Just a couple of days left before I flight to Orlando for RSDC’08 (IBM Rational Software Development Conference).

Two years ago I attended to this conference as a non-customer, and I was thoroughly impressed. It is always great to hear real customer case studies and to talk to other peers who share the same passion about application development tools. However, this year I am going to attend as a customer. The main difference is that as a customer you can meet some IBM/Rational key figures (and I am not referring to the R-Heroes) and attend to some reserved events. For example, this year I have scheduled some meetings with some Rational PM’s and another one with our Lab Advocate. And I have also been invited to the VoiCE event, where they are going to explain us future products (unfortunately under NDA) and where we can vent all our anger, for example, about how complicated and heavy are some of their tools. Let’s see how great the conference would be this time.

This year I am also specially excited, as I am going to meet some virtual “friends” in real life. People like Bill or Patrick, with whom I have interacted via email, chat, blogs or Twitter. And of course, Kelly, the only one, who after all these years of online interactions she deserves lots of big hugs and kisses (and not only because she set aside for me a VERY limited Rational Support Moo card). And ssshhh, keep a secret, we have both started to set up an open Twitter and Blog meetup at the Disney’s Swan bar, so stay tunned!

If you are going and you are reading this post, shoot me an e-mail at frodenas [at] gmail [dot] com or comment this post. We can swap contact info and figure out how to meet up. If you are not attending and you are interested in knowing what happens during the conference, just follow the #rsdc hastag or search for the rsdc2008 tag.