I have just returned from the best conference of all time. NSConference 2009, in Hatfield, U.K., was perfect in so many ways I hardly know where to begin.

The facility: The deHavilland Conference Center seem to have recruited their employees from the Society of Happy Helpful People. The room was just right, the food was excellent, the beer was real, and my stay there was delightful.

The speakers: I’ve written about how programmers are smart. The speakers were the smartest of the smart. The presentations were engaging, informative, useful, and well planned.

The organizers: The entire event reflected Scotty’s infectiously jolly character. As it turns out, he’s quite an organizer, too. For a first-time event, the smooth and efficient operation was remarkable. His motto could have been, “All needs anticipated, all preferences accommodated.”

The design competition: The conference closed with an inspired idea: two teams of developers were given a set of requirements and had to design, but not build, an application. It was all the fun of Iron Coder without the work. Scotty kept saying the idea might be a disaster. It wasn’t.

The attendees: NSConference 2009 was populated by developers from all over Europe, with a few North American infiltrators added to the mix. What made the group especially cohesive was our shared experience with the loneliness of being a Cocoa developer. Here in Kentucky I am certainly never going to meet another Cocoa developer, and I’m sure my European counterparts know the feeling. We don’t have a NSCoder Night to attend. Our wives and girlfriends might listen sweetly as we talk about AppKit, but it’s not the same, really. So, you throw a hundred of these guys together and you can be sure they are going to have a great time.

All the folks I met at the conference write code and inhabit a spot somewhere along the trajectory of application development: from the thinking about it stage, to the actively working on it stage, to the selling it and making money stage. At other conferences I’ve attended there were writers and CEOs and representatives from big companies mingled among the coders. At NSConference, we were all coders.

And that might explain why, from the opening moments of the conference, we were all talking about next year. It’s just inconceivable that such a wonderful event would be a one-off; there simply has to be one next year. Banks may fail and economies may sour, but please oh please let there be NSConference 2010.

When the taxi driver took me to the train station on the morning after the conference, he shook my hand and wished me a pleasant journey. It had to end just that way. The taxi driver’s little pleasantry was emblematic of the time I spent in Hatfield.

The friendships forged at NSConference 2009 will last a very long time. Thanks, Scotty.