Conferences

Our Irrational Fear of Real-time Exposure

I made an interesting observation when I was at one of the sessions at the Øredev conference today that struck me as kind of weird…

Even though we are out there exposing ourselves on facebook, blogs and twitter, we are not comfortable sitting next to someone that are watching us typing while we are writing our blog post or tweet. As soon as we hit the submit button everything changes. Now we actually want people to read the stuff. That is why I call this

our irrational fear of real-time exposure

Exposure is fine, which the popularity of facebook and twitter are evidence of, as long as we are not caught doing it. Feel free to tweet, blog or comment on this 🙂

Øredev 2009 – Day 3

I was not present at the conference yesterday, so this is actually my second day here, and that also explains why there were no post from yesterday. Another explanation could have been that I was lazy, but that is not the case this time… 🙂

Well, over to what this post is all about: the conference. The keynote was held by Scott Hanselman. He gave an excellent talk about effectiveness and efficiency. Some really good stuff to bring back from that speech. Will try to list some of the techniques and tools he mentioned in a later blog post.

I will also summarize the rest of the sessions I attended today very soon here…

Great conference!

Øredev 2009 – Day 1

The conference was opened with a keynote by Marc Lesser. He talked about how to accomplish more by doing less. It was a kind of usual opening of a technology oriented conference, but I guess a bit of zen thinking early in the morning can only do us good.

Ola Bini presented the folding language Ioke. I will definitely download this and play around with it. Hopefully, I can use it in some presentation in near future. Really cool and fun!

The next presentation I attended was Neal Ford’s presentation about XP in practice. Nothing really new there, but more a confirmation that what I feel we are doing right applies to others as well. And, more valuable, tips and techniques for how to improve on what we are doing not so right. At last a kind of nerdy way of looking at pair programming:

  • 100 eyes
  • 010 brains
  • 001 mind

Continuing on the agile track, Dan North gave an excellent talk about our obsession with efficiency. The three key points to remember from his talk is:

  • You get what you measure
  • Not all vendors are bad guys
  • Efficiency isn’t effective

Back to the languages track, I attended a talk by Neal Ford where he compared Groovy and JRuby. It gave me a pretty good comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of both languages.

The only session on the Java track was a disappointment. The only thing I really got from this presentation was that I could charge my netbook’s batteries. Still running OpenSolaris on it, by the way, and is generally happy with it!

Last technical presentation today was about clojure. Kind of tough thing to jump into this late in the afternoon, but the presenter, Stuart Halloway, did a great job.

In the afternoon keynote, Cameron Purdy did a comparison of Java and C++.

Overall experience from the first day of the conference is good. It is impressive that they have gathered so many international speakers. If I should pick on something, it has to be that the opening of the conference would benefit from being a little more flashy. Maybe have the opener learn his speech and practice on the English pronunciation…?

And now, it is time for mingle and beer!

Was 2009 the last JavaOne

Usually, there has always been a sign on the top of the escalator in Moscone North with the dates of the next JavaOne Conference. This year, the sign said “Thanks for joining us this year.”.

Was this the last JavaOne

I am absolutely sure there will be some sort of large java conference, but it will be up to Oracle to decide on the format and if they want to continue running the JavaOne conferences. I surely hope they will! This was my tenth JavaOne and I hope to be adding to that number…

JavaOne 2009 Wrap-up

The 2009 JavaOne Conference is over. As always, Sun manages to pull offf a great show even if it was not very much new stuff presented. The focus was on JavaFX and The Cloud and I think these are things we are going to be hearing a lot of in the future as well.

The JavaFX platform is getting more mature and tools supporting it are popping up everywhere. It has never been easier to create great user interfaces. Let’s just hope we developers let the designers do their job and focus on the logic behind…

The cloud is hotter than ever and there are some great products out there. Take a look at the Sun Cloud Computing web site for an overview.

JavaOne 2009 – Day 4

The keynote on the last day of JavaOne is all about toys. James Gosling presented a wide array of projects and products that have used the power of java in all sorts of ways.

I spent the rest of the day attending technical sessions. The most interesting one was an introduction to Google Guice. I am definitely going to take a closer look at that. Guice will probably form the foundation for JSR 330: Dependency Injection for Java, so it should not be too much of an effort migrating over to this standard from Guice in the future if that is desirable.

JavaOne 2009 – Day 3

The third day of JavaOne is always kind of weird. Your are in the middle of the conference, but painfully close to the end. The pavillion closes (as I have pointed out in my evaluation forms every year!) too early! Why do they have to start packing down all the stuff at 14:00? Do they have so tight schedule at Mocsone to prepare for the Apple Developer Connection that they can’t wait a couple of hours more..?

After the Swing Rocks presentation, I spent some time on the pavillion before attending a presentation on Bean Validation (JSR 303). Validation of input has always been a pain in-the-ass so I embrace this JSR with my heart.

The night ended with a couple of parties before heading back to the hotel. Tomorrow is the last day of JavaOne 2009. I wonder if there will be a JavaOne 2010….

Swing Rocks at JavaOne 2009

I am not usually attending the Swing presentations at JavaOne, but this year I had to make an exception. A couple of friends from Malmö (Pär and Martin) gave a presentation called Swing Rocks: A tribute to Filthy-Rich Clients.

Here is a picture of them right before the presentation starts
Before the presentation

And one taken during the presentation
During the presentation

For more information about what they are up to to get the source code from their examples, check out their website, swing-rocks.com

JavaOne 2009 – Day 2

Day 2 at JavaOne 2009 started with a keynote given by Sony Ericsson. They talked a lot about the importance of user experience and their focus of delivering seamless service experience to the end users. The whole history of PlayNow arena was gone through on the big screen all the way from 2004 until today. Sony Ericsson wants to be seen as “The Communication Entertainment Brand”, and PlayNow arena is a part of that strategy. They also announced that applications will soon be supported by PlayNow.

All the time during the presentation, Erik Hellman coded a JavaFX application combining Google Maps and Twitter to show all the tweets submitted during the presentation in the San Francisco area. The application was finally deployed on three different phone platforms.

At the end of the keynote, Sony Ericsson announced the Sony Ericsson Content Submission submit.sonyericsson.com.

The rest of the conference day was as it normally is. Lots of great presentations. Joshua Bloch gave is inevitable Effective Java presentation. This year, it was a bit of a copy from last year’s, but his presentations are usually well worth attending.

The day ended at a party held by Adobe and SpringSource in combination. They gave a short presentation of  spring-flex before opening the bar…