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Ayende and his tricks
By Mogens Heller Grabe | July 8, 2009
This year at JAOO, I have one thing that I absolutely MUST see: Ayende’s “Object Relational Mapping += 2: More than just data <=> object“.
If you are a .NET person, you probably already know Ayende because of his incredible diligence as a blogger and his (usually pretty bold) opinions.
If you don’t know him, I bet you know the projects he is involved in: he is a major NHibernate committer, he is currently the lead of Castle MicroKernel/Windsor, and he maintains his own catalogue of projects (Rhino Mocks among others), and he is currently developing the NHibernate Profiler. Moreover, he is an active speaker, teacher, and consultant, and he has authored “Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo” which has recently been released on Manning.
Ayende is not only cool because of his unusually high activity level – he is also a very opinionated and pragmatic software developer, often undogmatic and incredibly self-confident, and in my opinion always very convincing. He is the origin of the JFHCI motto, he is never afraid of questioning “best practices” and sometimes playing the devil’s advocate, and he never seems to stop showing off his incredible depth AND breadth of knowledge and skill – lige e.g. when he gnawed his way through the CouchDB codebase in a few days, posting reviews of the code as he went along, not having read any Erlang code ever before he begun!
Another funny thing is that Ayende seems to identify himself with a rhinoceros, hence the naming scheme used in most of the artifacts he produces – and it takes only a few seconds of exposure to his nature to understand why he sees himself that way: rhinos are big and stubborn, and they push forward with great force. Rhinos have relatively small brains, however (at least compared to their size), but I assure you that this is one characteristic that he does NOT share with rhinos 
I’m guessing that his presentation will show us some of the lesser-known features – a few NHibertricks, if you will – of some popular OR/M that he has put to use in various projects to reduce friction. As I am using some popular .NET OR/M myself in various projects as well, I am very curious to learn some of the tricks he has up his sleeve! I just KNOW this is going to be good!
