Next week I'm headed down to sunny Atlanta to speak at the second CoderFaire. It's a two day event giving people the opportunity to connect across technology communities to learn new stuff and create fun things.

That's the cool thing about CoderFaire. Unlike the PHP events or the .Net events or all the other language/technology-specific events that happen out there, this one is truly and completely across technologies.

When I attended the first one last fall in Nashville, it was 200+ attendees from across the technology and industry spectrum. You had Ruby hackers hanging out with a few corporate .Net types talking with Perl summoners.

Well, ZendCon has officially been done for a week... so what is there left to say that Ed Finkler, Travis Swicegood, Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Ivo Jansch, Michelangelo van Dam, Akeem Philbert, Anna Filina, Jason Austin, and Bradley Holt haven't said?

Well honestly, not much... so I'm going to do some quick hits and move on.

The Good

It's been two months since BarCampRDU, but I figured I owed them a review.  After all, the event was... well, I'll save that for the end.

First off, I ended up attending almost by accident. I caught a Tweet about the event and realized it was on NC State University's campus where Garrison Locke and Jason Austin work.  So - as a joke - I mention that I should go.  Three seconds later, Shaun Farrell speaks up and offers to drive while Jason offers us real bedrooms.  The rest was just gas money and details.

I've already mentioned the fun that will be php|tek 2009 in this space but there's so much going on between now and then... right here in Washington, DC!

First we have DrupalConDC here in March.  It's going to be a huge event with hundreds (over a thousand?) Drupal'ers coming from all over the country and the world to trade ideas, kick around new ones, and see what happens.  The sessions are still being selected but there are easily over a hundred to choose from ranging from jQuery to Enterprise Drupal to Drupal 7 to Why I hate Drupal.  I'll be there - and am an Individual Sponsor - and I'm already looking forward to it.  The community has been in a buzz for months over it.