I've been in Stockholm this past week at the Developer Summit presented by Cornerstone.

In addition to the familiar tracks there were two very interesting tracks: People Matter Too and Dynamic Languages.

The People Matter Too track had talks that revolved around how teams can work together effectively, enabling team members to contribute in ways that their job titles may not define and about thought processes.

While I was unable to attend these, I was fortunate enough to have Claudio Perrone from InnerWorkings share his session with me a bit later. Claudio's session was about collaboration and while his message in itself was enlightening, he is a master of the Presentation Zen style and therefore his message combined with the delivery was quite powerful.

Dan North of ThoughtWorks also did a talk in this track. Dan is also a Presentation Zen kinda guy. The title of Dan's talk was "No Best Practices: Methodology for thinkers". I knew from talking with him that I really wanted to attend this session, but alas I was giving a Silverlight 2.0 talk at the same time. So many people were talking about Dan's session later, that I seem to have gotten to get the basics of it vicariously.

ThoughtWorks had a big presence at the conference as a sponsor and with some of their team giving talks. The founder of the company, Roy Singham swung by Stockholm on his way from somewhere in Asia to somewhere else in the world. The company is a realization of Roy's passion about enabling thought leaders. The company has earned a very fond spot in my heart as they just hired a woman who's job is to help encourage young women to follow their dreams of the IT industry.

Thanks to the Dynamic Languages track, I was able to meet Michael Howard who I believe is one of the foremost experts on IronPython outside of Microsoft. Michael was a Python guy who crossed over to use the .NET version . I really enjoyed being a fly on the wall of a conversation between Michael and a Ruby programmer. Rather than it sounding like "yeah, well, my language is better than yours", the converstaion went more like, "hey cool, mine does that too, just this way". I can't tell you how great that was to hear!

Between the many conversations I had with folks over the days about thinking, about Presentation Zen, about languages and about ALT.NET (thanks to a very long discussion with Niclas Nillson, I leave Sweden with my head filled with new ideas which I'm very excited about.