It was a very nice week in San Francisco. It was not due to the sessions because I didn’t went to any 😉 but it was really interesting meeting people, some already well known from mailings and new ones.

From the second group it was really good to see how more and more people use Maven, and those that still don’t use it know a lot about it. The reasons not to use it also moved from other years from “my build is fine with ant” or “I don’t like the standards that Maven imposes” to “it’s something we want to do but still didn’t have the time”. The good news is that now Mergere is offering Maestro, a user friendly bundle with Maven, Continuum, a sample application, with user documentation, the “Better Builds with Maven” book, a nice installer and using a faster repository, which many people would appreciate, as the fact that everything is completely free and open source (which is not always the same).

From the first group aka “the usual suspects”, I’d like to point out that after some drinks geeks start being more talkative ;). The ones that deserve special mention for their abilities with the glass are Rob Harrop (Spring), Gregor Hohpe (Google), Dan Diephouse (XFire) aka seXFire, Hani (The Bile Blog), and the ever present David Blevins (Geronimo), Dain Sundstrom (Geronimo) , James Strachan (LogicBlaze), Hiram Chirino (LogicBlaze),… I’m sure I forget people but I have an excuse… I was trying to keep up with them!

Also wednesday I went to see the Champions Leage final, playing Barcelona-Arsenal. It was a lot of fun watching it with the guys as I was the only spaniard around against a bunch of britons, but of course at the end we won 2-1. A really good game.