A good Wee Dram - with more Scotch on the way . . .

As always it was great to meet a bunch of old friends. I really wasn't sure how well a one day, single track conference in the basement of a pub was going to work out, but I figured it was worth giving it a shot.

From my (amazing) experiences at Scotch on the Rocks I should have known better. All of the content was solid mid-level material (which appeared to be pretty well suited to the audience experience level), and because there were no hallways to get pulled into long discussions in, we all attended all of the presentations and I think everyone learnt something. The event then ended up with an evening upstairs in the bar catching up with people and doing all the talking we'd missed by not having corridors to get stopped in between sessions!

It was an excellent event, it ran along smoothly, and it really provided a great chunk of the value of a larger conference with a much smaller outlay of time and money by everyone involved.

In fact, Andy and Kev announced at the end that this year instead of trying to persuade everyone to fly up to Edinburgh for three days, they're going to "bring the conference to you", hosting smaller "A Wee Dram" style events in London, Edinburgh and Dublin and while I would have been a little dubious if you'd asked me a couple of days ago, after seeing how well this worked I think it is going to work out really well and be very worth attending.

So, thanks to Kev and Andy for all the hard work, the other presenters for their great content (Sean did a short writeup - and one on the keynote), and to everyone who turned up.

To old friends and new.

And now we know - Kev and Andy really *can* organize a p&ss up in a brewery. Who'd have thunk it? :-)