Must See Lizard Brain Web Design

It's the morning of the last day of the first NFJS of 2009 and as I wait for things to get hopping, I had to mention that if you get a chance at a NoFluff event or elsewhere, you've got to see Scott Davis' talk titled Lizard Brain Web Design. If you are involved in web development this session will give you some great insight and ideas as to how to make your users happy that they went to your site. If you're not involved in web development, go see it anyway cause it's just plain fun!

Scott also gave a new talk called Dim Sum Grails. This was about as thorough a trip through Grails land as you could possibly fit into 90 minutes.

Brian Goetz, who I've heard has to bring an extra suitcase to carry his brains, gave a very helpful talk on Java Concurrency. He gave so many tips that it would be difficult to not pickup a few nuggets you can use right away. While Brian is not quite as dynamic a speaker as Scott, he is a good teacher and is able to get complex ideas across to the audience.

The day was capped off with the BOFs. I went to the JVM languages BOF and it was interesting but not quite as lively as they had been in the past. The discussion turned more towards functional languages and they just don't seem to get people quite as excited as dynamic languages. That or maybe we were all just to brain-full to get excited about anything.

Anyhow, it's been great so far and there's one more day to go. Today we'll hear more from Brian Goetz and Neal Ford, and Venkat Subramaniam, along with Stu Halloway. Good stuff in Milwaukee - stay up to date with the NoFluff news on Twitter. Search for #nfjs

Final Day of Final No Fluff Just Stuff of 2008

At many conferences the last day is where the less gifted speakers or the less interesting topics get placed.  Not here!  Today was jam-packed with interesting presentations given by such notables as Brian Sletten, Andy Glover, Ken Sipe, David Geary and Stu Halloway.   This was actually the toughest day to choose which talks to go to.  I considered trying to run back and forth to try to catch more than one, but wisdom and laziness prevented that.  

So I started the day out with Andy Glover's "Groovin' builds Gant get any easier".  Andy did a great job of explaining what happens when you combine the utility of a feature-rich build system like Ant with the expressiveness and power of Groovy.  Anyone using Ant can benefit from Gant.  I can't see why anyone would stay with XML based Ant.   One thing that I always appreciate about Mr. Glover's talks is the way he draws even the most recalcitrant audience into his talks.  It's fun to see a master at work.

Speaking of masters, the next session I went to was Brian Sletten's "Restlet for the Weary".  I kept getting this feeling that a Restlet plugin for Grails might be a good thing.  I wonder if anyone has done that yet.  I don't think it's mere coincidence that you can rearrange the letters in Brian's name to spell "Brain".  

After another delicious lunch, we came to my favorite event, the expert panel.  The interaction between the speakers, audience and Jay Zimmerman, the host and moderator, is just hilarious, while being informative at the same time.  Ladies and gentlemen, don't try this at home.   

This might not have been a good idea, but I finished up the day in a two part session by Stu Halloway.  Stu has a series of 4 talks based on his recent blog posts titled Java.next.  The two sessions that he had this weekend were great and Stu is one of the smartest people I've ever met, but it was a bit much for my brain after three days.   In fact, I am still mentally digesting much of what he talked about.  I will have to do a follow up to this post.  But in the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out his blog.  Be sure to do it on an empty brain, so to speak.

Well that's it for No Fluff Just Stuff  2008.  I've said it before and I'll say it again.  These are, by far, the best technical events available.  If you haven't been to one, get to one.  If there isn't one near you that's no excuse.  There is a group of guys from the Netherlands that come to one each year.  Since they have to fly in anyway, they go to a different city each year.  So there's no excuse.  Check the schedule.  If you're in the northern midwest, the Milwaukee NFJS will be Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009.  See you there!

NFJS Chicago Day Two was packed!

Today the schedule was packed with good sessions.  It was very difficult to choose which session to go to.  Though I found out something- if you wait too long to decide the decision gets easier as some of the rooms fill up! 

After a great breakfast and discussion with Mark Richards and a preview of the material for the 10th anniversary meeting of NEJUG (if you live near Boston don't miss the January meeting), I went to Jared Richardson's Distributed Agile talk.  Jared' s high energy and upbeat outlook are great for getting you going in the morning.  Since I am currently working on a distributed team, this was a very timely session.  

Next I caught Alex Miller's tour of Terracotta.  That's an impressive piece of software!  I am going to have to look into it more.  It seems like something you should have to pay a huge amount of money for but it's free and open source.  Wow!  

After lunch where I unsuccessfully attempted to get a CapJug table together (sorry guys!),  I went to hear Neal Ford's talk all about Regular Expressions, which I told him look to me like cartoon swearing.   As part of the talk he had a quiz where he showed different regex samples and we were supposed to guess what they were.  One of them turned out to not be a regular expression at all but real cartoon swearing!  It was a very good discussion though and I think I'm starting to figure those things out.  Maybe between this talk and Ted Naleid's blog post, I'll finally be able to understand the next time a cartoon character cusses me out.

Next was Jeff Brown's Agile Test Driven Development with Groovy.  This is another that I had been to before but it's still got some good reminders in it and besides it was one of only two talks Jeff was giving and I had to go to one of them.  I was kind of bummed that Jeff didn't do any of his Grails talks this weekend.  In fact the whole show was a bit light on Grails goodness.  I'll have to note that on the conference eval :)  

Finally there was the JVM languages BOF with Scott Davis, Stu Halloway and Jeff Brown.  There was some very good discussion on various languages such as JRuby, Clojure, Scala and, of course, Groovy.  Groovy appeared to be the favorite of the audience here, but Clojure does sound pretty interesting.  Or should I say, Stu Halloway makes Clojure sound pretty interesting. Stu is working on a book on the topic which is in beta now.  I'll have to check it out.

All in all, a great day.  My head is swimming with ideas and starting to get a bit stuffed, but there's still one more day of the last No Fluff of the year. 

NFJS Chicago Day One Wrapup

While Scott Davis went on to blow everyone's mind with Groovy: The Red Pill, I snuck over to catch Neal Ford's Productive Programmer talk.  I have the book but it's tough to ask a book questions.  It was great and I picked up some very helpful tips that I can put to use on my recently acquired MacBook Pro.  (which is just awesome! by the way).  Next, while my son Ben was keeping an eye on Scott during Rapid Web Development with Grails and Ajax, I took in Nathaniel Schutta's talk on Improving Code Quality.  Nate gave a good recap of some of the best stuff out of Pragmatic Programmer with excellent anecdotes to drive the points home.  

Dinner was great as usual at a NoFluff.  No boxed lunches here!  I ran into some more Madisonians including a former co-worker from the State of Wisconsin.  It was great to hear that Grails is still making life better for them there.  But then Grails makes life better wherever it is tried.  :-)  

Unfortunately I missed Neal Ford's keynote due to an abundance of good conversations with some of the smartest people I know.   Time now to rest up.  Tomorrow's a big day.  Joining the speaker lineup is the one and only Stu Halloway as well as David Geary, David Hussman, and rounding out the St. Louis contingent, Jeff Brown and Ken Sipe (Alex Miller is also from St. Louis... must be something in the water over there).

Stay tuned for more from this, the last No Fluff Just Stuff of the year.