Greetings from Crested Butte!
I’m here, at Bruce Eckel’s Web Framework Jam, and (as expected) learning a lot already. We’ve broken up into 3 groups, each working on a different framework. Initial task is to become familiar with the framework. My group is working on TurboGears (the preview version, 0.9), and we’re not just working through the tutorial but also inspecting a lot of code along the way. A second group is working with Hibernate/Swing, and the third is using the Google Web Toolkit.
Each day, there’s time set aside for recreation (hey, if you’re in a beautiful place like this, you really SHOULD get out and do something!). Yesterday, we went on a nice, flat hike at Lake Irwin (flat is good, since we’re all still acclimating to the altitude, 9300 ft). Later in the week, I’m hoping to do some mountain biking. But … as we saw with the Programming the New Web conference here last March, the “breaks” really serve as a way for the groups to interact about what they’re learning as well. A lot (most) of the conversation centers around what we’re doing, something that most people who hang around with computer geeks probably don’t find surprising.