it’s been a super crazy week for me, as most of you know.. i’ve been in atlanta all week getting properly assimilated into jboss, inc. this week was the “jboss developer conference”, where all the developers of jboss come to atlanta, and tell all the other developers what they’re doing. it was extremely informative, if a little boring at times (it was a 3 1/2 day meeting, and developers have short attention spans). so, here i am, in atlanta airport, with two hours to go before they start boarding my plane home. this probably won’t go up until after i get home, but it was written in the airport i promise! looks like i’m gonna have plenty of time to do a day by day synopsis of my experiences. here goes.

sunday night
paige and i decided to go to red robin one last time before i left for atlanta. we were cutting time a little short, but things were going to be fine. that is, until we realized that paige’s tote bag wasn’t going to be anything close to big enough for all the crap i needed for this trip (5 days worth of clothes + toiletries + electronics + extra space for goodies..). my flight leaves at 6:30, it’s 5:20, and I’m luggage-less. i stole paige’s santa fe and rushed like hell over to kohl’s where apparently they have luggage so over priced it would make mr. t blush. i couldn’t even find a tote for less than $60. i pity the foo’. so, i had to resort to the humanly unthinkable. i had to go to walmart. driving like a crazed maniac, i made it to the walmart parking lot promptly and was literally running the 3 miles (maybe an overestimate) across the parking lot into the store-of-the-masses. once inside, i had to go through 2 illegal immigrants walmart employees to finally find the luggage section. luckily enough for me, i found a pretty nice mid-sized suitcase w/ accompanying pull handle and wheels for the cheap-third-world-country-labor price of $24.95. there was no time for moral clarity at a time like this. i needed luggage, and i needed it an hour ago. i ran to the checkout lanes, and surprisingly enough, there was an empty line. as soon as i get rung up, i realize that i left my cash in the car. crap! i looked like a power walking middle aged woman at 6 in the morning trying to get to the cash. i grabbed it, came back, paid for the suitcase, halled it over my back, ran back to the car, and got the hell out of there. at this point it’s 5:50 and my flight leaves at 6:30. thank god i only live 5-10 minutes from the airport. i had prepped paige over the phone that we needed to vam-fucking-moose once she got home. i tried printing off my itenerary but alas, computer problems. while i was trying to figure it out, paige so gracefully packed all my crap into the new suitcase for me (paige roxors my boxors). the printer was a failed experiment, so i just grabbed all the info from the emails, and pasted them into text files on my laptop, and we ran out. it took us 10 minutes from apartment front door to drop off at departures. i think i was the last person on the plane.. phew. a narrowly missed disaster. on the plane, i took the opportunity to look over my demo code before my mini-presentation on monday morning, listened to some rxbandits, and had some pretzels. apparently atlanta has a pretty decent train system called marta. i was instructed to take the marta from the airport to our hotel, so i did accordingly. a 25 mile trip cost me $1.75.. woo public transportation! i arrived at the embassy suites at around 12AM, where ivelin and adrian brock were sipping over a few drinks. i joined them and had a beer.. but quickly retired afterwards because i surely didn’t want less than 6 hours of sleep.

monday
it took a lot of energy to get myself out of bed, i was dead tired. i showered, and brushed my teeth with all the mini-sized toiletries i had bought the day before, then got dressed and headed out to meet my fellow team members. alex loubyasky (CMP fame) stepped onto the elevator on my way down to the breakfast bar. at the time, i didn’t know he worked for jboss, i just figured he was another random person in the hotel. after i followed him to the breakfast bar, and sat down by the same people, it was obvious. i introduced myself, as did he.. he’s a really easy going ukranian that didn’t speak unless spoken to, and is also the 2nd youngest employee at jboss. guess who’s youngest? since we were both running a little late, i followed him about a quarter of a mile to the jboss offices. our meeting was being held in the conference rooms across the hall. me, alex, and andy oliver also showed up late.. around the same time. i walked into scott stark giving a talk.. d’oh! late on the first day. we were instructed to sit over on the side with the crappy wooden backed chairs. so, we did and started listening. after scott gave his presentation, it was time for a nice 10 minute break. everyone was eager to meet the new guys, so i got a little swamped at first. max andersen, christian bauer, bill burke, scott stark, bela ban, marc fleury, and many more. i was a little taken back, but they were just as interested in me as i was in them. if there’s one thing that this trip has done for me, it’s to personify my team mates. i like that. there were a presentation on JBossAOP by bill, and i followed up with my demo of JBossIDE-AOP. everyone gave me a big thumbs up. yay! after i broke, there was one last presentation (remoting). once the day ended, we all went out to some random sports bar place and had dinner on the company. i chicken enchiladas, and sat next to marc fleury. i was telling how cool it was … what he did with his company, and is turning a profit out of open source, and how so many people want to do that and can’t. he kinda blushed.. which was unexpected to see out of a man like marc. the dinner lasted from 7PM to approx 10PM (poor waiters). we all walked back to the hotel and crashed early.

tuesday
fully rested, i was ready to face a new day with my new friends. coincedentally, this was also the only day i made it into the conference room on time. from now on i’ll just skip the presentations, and focus on what happened before, between, and after. i had breakfast with anil and a few other guys, and we all headed to the conference room. apparently the route i had taken the day before with alex was a very round-a-bout (and therefore time killing) way of getting there. anil showed me a much more effecient way. max and i had committed to getting a JBossIDE roadmap out before the end of the week, so we decided to have a meeting before they took us out for another dinner at 8PM. we hashed out the feature set and made pretty concrete what we wanted to do with our notes (which were spread slopilly across 6 or 7 embassy suites notepad sheets). i took responsibility of taking the notes and typing it into an official roadmap for distribution and approval. after our meeting, we all went out to fogo de chao. i had never known about this place, but they apparently have one in dallas and i’m going the first chance i get. it’s a brazilian meatery, where they serve you all you can eat filet mignoin, lamb chops, chicken skewers, steak, you name it. it was freaking awesome. there was enough wine going around that night to passify a city of french men. the total bill came out to something like $1600. <3 jboss. after dinner, bill invited me to come and play some poker .. which i did. i lost $15. stupid me. we didn’t stop playing poker until 3AM, so you can imagine i got lots of sleep.

wednesday
with a grand total of 4 hours of sleep, i went on to be late for the second time. this time i was accompanied by kabir khan. apparently he had forgotten to set his alarm, as did i. when i came into the conference room, people started laughing at me. apparently someone was joking about me before i came, and now it was even funnier. oh, great. on the first break, i asked people what was going on.. and apparently bill had speculated that because of my poker losses, i’d be coming in late. the joke was on me. max and i had another short meeting on another break to talk over some revisions i wanted to make to the roadmap. he agreed, and we finalized the roadmap. it was now time for me to type this sucker up. after we left the conference, we were taken out yet again to maggiano’s italian restaurant. crazy good salmon, lasagna, bread and olive oil, wine, etc etc. ben sabrin made the announcement that jboss would be treating us to a night at “cheetah’s”. apparently, cheetah’s is a so called “gentelman’s club”. naturally, i declined (quite a few times), as did max, and bill, and a few other guys. we all walked back to the hotel while the rest went to the strip bar. i ended up crashing early again, completely exhausted by my apparent woe of losing $15. before i slept, i talked to paige and finished up the roadmap for JBossIDE (while drunk).

thursday
i woke up late for the last time, and had to attend a conference call with the web tools architecture guys. i spent an hour doing that while the rest of the developers listened to julien viet talk about jboss nukes. after i got back, i sent the typed up roadmap for max to review before we sent it out “officially”. he had one very minor change, and then we published it to the appropriate people. we’re still awaiting official feedback, but most of the “offline” comments have been positive so far. we ended early today at around 2pm. it was the final day of the conference and we all said our goodbyes. i can’t wait to see most of these guys again at JBossWorld in march.. they rock. now it was time for me to go to nashville, and visit with my father, amy, aaron, and aemily. i called up my dad and got directions to his place from atlanta, then grabbed a cab and headed to the rental car place. the rental car ended up costing me alot more than i wanted it to, but it was worth it. i actually ended up driving a dodge grand caravan because it was the only car they rented that had a tape player in it (which i need so i can plug my mp3 player’s tape adapter into..). i made the short(3.5 hours) but sweet trip to nashville and got there around 6:30PM central. i showed my dad what i’d been doing with jboss, told him all about the week.. we had a really good time. he had nothing but compliments for me when i was there, and i was completely humbled to get them from him. he’s always kind of been my programming role model. it was awesome to see them again, and i can’t wait until paige and i can get some more time to visit them for a longer amount of time.

friday
i had to wake up early so we could make it to grandma culpepper’s house before i left back for atlanta. i’m glad i got to see her, i haven’t in way too long. i drove back down and missed my car rental deadline by 10 minutes (d’oh!), so i talked the guy into not charging me for an extra hour. thankfully they were nice to me. i wrapped up everything, took a shuttle to the airport, and here i am writing this blog ;). woo! it worked, only 15 minutes until boarding time. thanks for being my boredom killer!