Day one of the Brazilian TechDays and the usual hussle and bussle. We have somewhere in the region of 1300 developers here which means the communal areas are just a little bit crowded. Thankfully we're having the event in the conference centre almost next to our hotel. This is a far better layout than the previous venue, which had more in common with an aircraft hangar than a conference centre.

James Gosling did the keynote; he talked a lot about the ubiquity of Java after ten years and also about the tools available from Sun. If you haven't done so already, you really should check out the NetBeans open source IDE. Version 4.1 is seriously cool.

After that it was the demo shootout and I'm happy to report that my team (as in the team I was on) won! I showed an early prototype of project Dave (DTrace Advanced Visualisation Environment), which draws pretty call graphs to show what happened when a system call is made by an application on Solaris 10. The GUI is all developed in Java, which taught me a lot about just how difficult it is to design a good, ergonomic, consistent user interface.

As predicted we did indeed go to the Jardiniere Grill last night and it was just as good as I remember. I have a feeling we'll be going back there again tonight.