St Louis .NET UG

I did a talk on remoting for the St Louis .NET User Group on Monday. It was very different than the one I did in January for the Austin .NET User  Group. The Austin meeting was quite an eye-opener: A large number of the people there were from the Java .com meltdown and most of the questions were about bridging between .NET Remoting and J2EE RMI. For those who care, check out Ja.NET from Intrinsyc and JNBridge Pro from JNBridge. The wierdest thing about the Austin talk was the ride back to the airport: The cab driver was a laid-off IBM Java developer with a master's in computer science. Very scary.

In contrast, the St Louis meeting was most notable for the fact that nobody whined about "when is the job market going to turn around". Apparently .NET developers in St Louis are doing well. Either that, or they were distracted by the opening day of their baseball season. How'd my talk go? Well, I got 2 requests for the slide deck and 4 requests for the Linux world-domination animation. Heck, maybe they too want to be "super-villains"!

3 Comments

  • Don't be too scared about the cab driver. Austin's in a major melt-down (my mother just moved back to the east coast from Austin this month), and probably the worst place to be in IT other than the valley. The cabbie should get out of Austin if he wants to work in his field.


  • The cabbie couldn't leave. He bought his house for $200K when times were good, couldn't sell it now for $150, and can't come up with the $20K he would need to walk away.

  • That's a shame about the house. Unfortunately (though he may not have been one of them), too many people in our industry thought the good times would never end, and bought more house than they could really afford. Of course, at $200k, sounds like that wasn't the case here...more a reminder to all of us of why our accountants (and our moms) keep telling us to save for a rainy day.

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