So, in the end, Dr. Dobb's Architecture & Design World was a worthwhile way to spend 4 days. Well, 3 and a half, anyway - we left after lunch on Thursday, because our flight was extremely late and we wouldn't have gotten home until long after midnight (Jim longer - he lives much further from the airport) and we found that there were seats on the 3 o'clock flight. The talks for the final session looked bad - we couldn't find anything that interested us, and the next to last session had one talk that we thought might have been decent, but given the recent sales pitch we had just experienced, we thought that a talk about scaling out databases by a guy who works for Sybase had too high of a risk of being another sales pitch. I'm not saying it was - we didn't have any slides to refer to - they were not published (that could be a warning sign right there) - so it could have been an awesome session - its just that given the information we had, we had to make a judgment call, and elected to ditch.

All in all, both Jim and I felt we had learned a lot, had generated a lot of good ideas we want to try out, and had a very positive experience. I'm hoping to maybe attend again next year.