Rjae, Rob, Kasia Baron, and I went to the Deep Agile 2008 conference run by New England Agile Bazaar. The event was held over the course of two days at MIT's Tang Hall and was truly outstanding. The structure of it, as noted at Agile Bazaar's website, was a one-on-one discussion, debate-style, between Robert Martin and James Coplien and it focused on the realities of Agile software development.
I was very, very impressed with both speakers on a number of levels. Both have a very passionate, energetic, entertaining style of speaking (Martin bears a particularly enjoyable similarity in speaking style to James T. Kirk of Star Trek fame) and both are profound thinkers that are masters of their respective views. I felt continually challenged while listening and was pretty much pushed throughout the two days to expand my thinking. At times the two were talking about the same topic but seemed to be addressing two different problem spaces within it, but it only added to the fun for me because getting exposed to what they see as the problems and solutions in modern software development was really the overriding theme in my mind. I base a lot of the things I do in software development upon Martin's teachings, so getting to see him speak for the first time was quite fulfilling. Prior to the weekend I was much less familar with James Coplien's thoughts, so getting to see him first-hand was really a treat because he thinks in a different style than I do and he clearly is a very experienced, very knowledgable, and very thoughtful guy.
I don't mean for this to be a play-by-play of the two days in any respect, mostly because I wouldn't do it justice. Instead, I highly recommend that if you get the opportunity to see either speaker--and certainly both at the same time--you should seize the moment. Essentially, if you get the chance to listen to such intelligent people, there's really nothing to lose and everything to gain.