Welcome to Nerdville... Population. Us. (posted by Arturo)

ahh.. TechEd 2005. Another conference under out belts. Our bellies full of free granola bars and bananas, and our brains, brimming with facts and information that we can’t wait put to use. But today, I want to reflect on another interesting aspect of this past week that some of us may have overlooked. One of the greatest things about conferences like this is the fact that it is one of the rare places where any stranger asking what you do... is legitimately interested in precisely that.

So often as a young professionals in the technology industry, we rarely get to answer that question in social situations with all the gory details involved. But not at TechEd. There everyone (well most everyone :) ) is just as excited about CLR Frameworks and SQL servers as you are. Where else can you chat to a stranger about migration strategies and unabashedly vocalize the fact that when you get back to the office, the first thing you're going to do is upgrade to Yukon and rewrite your co-workers favorite string parsing T-SQL function in C#. We openly have these conversations without fear that anyone sharing the table will feel the urge to stand up to find more interesting company elsewhere. Far from it, you often get the smile and the nod of someone who knows precisely what it is you’re talking about.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of social situations involving sitting at a bar and chatting about how my ears are still ringing from the show we just caught at Neumo's. The beauty, boys and girls, lays in the delicate balance that TechEd and conferences like it allow us to strike in our lives.

Viva La Zen
-arturo