Most of my compatriots on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour have blogged about the first symposium of the year, so I guess it's my turn.

I'm excited that things are rolling again. These are excellent events for the attendees, and also for the speakers. I'm always energized and enriched by spending a weekend talking to the other speakers and the audience members about software topics. (You'll notice that both the quantity and depth of my blogging has decreased during the break since the Atlanta symposium at the end of November. I expect it to begin picking up again now.)

This weekend in Austin I gave five talks. The two older talks (Introduction to XPath and Java Web Start and JNLP: The Return of the Rich Client) were both well received, and the three new ones went much better than I expected:

• Concurrent Programming Utilities -- I had a nice crowd for this one, and they were excited to learn about utility classes that can help them build better concurrent systems. More than one person said that they wished they had been to my talk a year ago, because it would have saved them a lot of grief.
• Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming and AspectJ -- I need to work on a better demo and a few more diagrams to help illustrate some tough concepts, but folks liked the talk anyway, and I don't think I lost anyone!
• Project Infrastructure Values, Principles, and Practices -- This is my favorite talk of the bunch, and it also went really well. It ended up being about 20 minutes too short, which was unfortunate for this time, but it's nice because it means I'll have time for some demos and more in-depth information next time around.

I'll be doing the same slate of talks at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium the last weekend in March. I can't wait!