Pray tell, how does a plebeian joke about dongles signal that a developer is good?
"dev's interest in attending a conference and his company sponsoring it"
And as for his presence, it's not uncommon for a company to send a key developer and a friendly coworker to conferences, especially when it is far away (so he may just have been a friendly coworker of Andy Reid)
I will testify, brother. ;-)
It think what the gp post was saying is that usually (in most companies) developers who are not very good or are not pulling their weight, are not sent to conferences. What is the freaking reason to send someone to a conference to learn and bring new ideas if they are about to be sent out of the door?
I don't know about friendly coworkers. Maybe other companies do that, we don't. In my experience it is not about friendliness but about who deserves to go and who is passionate about programming.
And, yeah, I agree, I don't see any correlation between him making dongle jokes or being or not being a good programmer.