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Observing JAOO
By Steffen Jaques | September 30, 2008
So, I’m about 50% through the conference at this point, and I thought it would be nice with a retrospective at this point. Being at JAOO is beginning to grow on me. I feel quite comfortable with chatting to people, which was one of the harder bridges to cross. But it’s also good fun just listening in on the different topics that other people are talking about. And with the flutter of different languages and the very casual and relaxed attitude that rules the conference, you really feel like it’s a “For Developers by Developers” conference – no doubt about that.
But what I have found is that it seems there are two types of people. When leaving a talk you almost always hear these comments: “Well, that wasn’t quite was I was expecting!” and “I think it was quite interesting/inspiring” (…except for that guy talking about unicorns?). I wonder if the people who argue that it wasn’t what they were expecting, were the same people who were there because they already knew something about the topic. I know I felt that way about the “Google Chrome: The invisible browser” talk. I had written up an entire blog-post, before this one, where I simply left out mentioning that talk. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who felt a bit bummed. In defense of Ben Goodger, the talk was exactly on topic and didn’t really contain anything but what the title promised. So even though I was initially dissatisfied with the talk Ben Goodger gave, it’s really about my expectations. And Ben Goodger explained it as well as anyone could expect, I feel.
How about all the other content so far? I’ve been bobbing around the different tracks, mostly because it’s all interesting. Cloud Computing is fluffy, but still interesting. Virtualization and Cloud Computing sounds neat, but seems like it’s something that will happen in the rather distant future, mostly because of trust issues.
Eric Meijer gave a talk about Fundamentalist Functional Programming on acid. Either that or he was just really, really excited about FFP. Mr. Meijer is on a mission to brain-wash the industry into doing more Functional Programming. And I can’t blame him. It’s really cool – and I like Eric’s colorful t-shirts too!
Anyway, what I’ve gathered so far is that the trend seems that we are supposed to begin to move away from traditional system development thinking and start thinking more about concurrency! And that makes sense with these new multi-core CPUs. And functional programming with Erlang is a good place to start. Other than that we need to think about if our architecture makes understanding and using our software difficult. And apparently, according to James A. Coplien, refactoring is bad – very, very bad. It slows us down because we are redoing our work, when we could be doing something new for the project. But let me ask you Mr. Coplien: “What about collective code-ownership? Isn’t that part of the whole Agile/Scrum/XP hoo-ha?, and doesn’t refactoring help strengthen the team-members’ understanding of the entire system? And isn’t refactoring meant to improve the quality of our products/services?”. Just asking!
Unfortunately I missed the party due to being completely exhausted from being in observationalist mode, but I hope you all enjoyed it very much.
