Bryan Cantrill's talk was indeed some serious propeller head material. He clarified the types of real-time systems, sharing the new buzzword DIRTy app. Be advised, if your cool in 2012, you'll be writing planet-scale Data Intensive Real-Time apps ;)

Developer's responded well to extremely technical talks:

Being a business focused conference, I was okay with the hand wavy business oriented talks, but whatever.

The subtext of the conference was Iaas and Paas companies. Node.js + MongoDb was all over NodeSummit. The pair (and maybe throw in Redis) have really captured this startup crowds imagination. It made me think about the old days of LAMP, when it was first coined.

I still haven't found any NoSQL product that I treated as my new precious golden hammer. Maybe I'm turning into an old man ... always knowing how to "do it better" with a RDBMS... so I'll give MongoDB another spin soon....

Node is maturing was a major theme. Ryan stated several times through the conference that the core is largely finished. Node was ported natively to Windows with the help of Microsoft. Many companies talked about it being ready for prime-time and that it has reduced their hardware costs.

Mark Mayo pointed to tooling, debugging, and profiling support as next steps for the community. He talked about developer difficulties at Mozilla scaling out BrowserID on Node:

I wasn't aware of SmartOS being deployable outside of Joyent for free. I'm looking forward to trying that out and looking at DTrace for debugging node apps during development. I'd prefer to have a debugger and profiler on Linux, but this could be a good stop-gap until then.

Congrats to the WindowsAzure team! They showed the potential of the Cloud9IDE for a web based IDE. So freaking cool, the dream of Bespin was demonstrated finally by a Microsoftie using a MacBook to deploy to their Node service offering... Wow.

Their Infrastructure cloud offering has a SLA, which is a first and should ruffle some competitors feathers. Their methods sound very conservative and sound.

It was shocking to me that Microsoft seemed fairly hip, but Google was largely absent from the game. What is going on with the universe? Speaking of the universe, there was one Google panelist who's connection to node seemed tenuous (couldn't comment on node use?!?), but the gem he offered was dropping the term 'planet scale'. So... gooood.

The history of JavaScript panel was amazing. A Dart question was asked which met tumbleweeds. There was some good natured Google/Dart ribbing from Jason Hoffman CTO of Joyent joked about this JavaScript language panel that:

There was some Machine to Machine discussions. BrassMonkey was clearly bad-ass, allowing you to use your phone as a game controller.

The NodeJam featured dozens upon dozens of startups, and was an important component of the Summit.

Lots of promising ideas including Storify who is hosting this post.

All and all it was a great conference. I think the next Summit will probably have mechanisms built in to keep bizdev tracks separate from technology tracks. Thanks NodeSummit!