Today is the first day of PG-West, also known as JDCon-west. After having about a week off to visit places and visit friends, I'm now back up in San Francisco for this conference, which will cover most of this week. It's a bigger conference than JDCon has been before - in most measures. It as more sessions than ever before - but you have to wonder who thought it was a good idea to have five parallel sessions. That's almost a guarantee that there will be more than one session you really want to go do. I'd rather have seen it in fewer tracks and spread over more time.
It's also bigger in attendees than before. Last I heard it was at 203 or something like that - just over 200. That means that for the first time, JDCon is actually larger than a PGDay.EU (that had just over 190 last year) - I'm sure being in a great location in central San Francisco helps with that, along with the fact that the economy is in a better place now than a year ago. We're still in the lead over time (we were well over 200 a couple of years back), but we're also both well beaten by the Brazilians. It' sets a good target for us to work towards!
The set of sessions looks really good, but as usual the hallway track is the one where much of the really good things happen. I missed this mornings tutorial sessions completely due to very interesting discussions outside. Hopefully the slides and notes and/or video will be available to look over once we're done. If you're tracking this from away, the twitter stream has some interesting comments - and will hopefully have more!
Speaking of conferences - if you haven't already, now's a good time to register for pgday.eu. Particularly if you are planning to attend one of the training sessions - at least one of the sessions is already more than half sold out!