Smart guys, great life, cool technology.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a development meeting in Stuttgart, Germany organized by the folks I work for. It really had the atmosphere of a small DrupalCon or similar FOSS conference -- a lot of intense thinking and discussion, but a lot of fun and really cool stuff at the same time.

Since some of the stuff we worked on is not ready for public consumption (though most will actually be contributed to the open source community eventually), I'll not write about it now.

But I did want to mention some really great people with whom I worked -- some I've met before and others who I only just met at this meeting. It really was a great experience and genuine pleasure for me to be able to work and play (did I mention the beer?) with these people.

In no particular order, they were:

• Ralph Meijer, a Jabber software foundation developer
• Steven Wittens, a Drupal core developer
• Jay Carlson, from The MITRE Corporation and a developer of machine-based natural language translation software
• Adrian Rossouw, Boris Mann, Djun Kim and James Walker of Bryght
• Matt Henderson, Michel Ricart, Fausto Roveda, Arto Bendiken, and Alex Bendiken of MakaluMedia
• Dan Karran of M.C. Dean - Europe
• Darren Ferguson of OpenBand
• Ivan Labra and Chris Rynearson of SPAWAR
• Andy Smith of Flock

And then there were the people who helped make the meeting happen: Jackie, Heike, Beate, Matt, Jim and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. To you, my sincere gratitude for all the hard work you did behind the scenes and during the meetings to make everything go so well.

To all of you (if you read this), it was great working with you, and I look forward to our future endeavors together.

Oh yes, and photos. My wife took some and they're here on flickr.