No Fluff Just Stuff – Seattle

22 Oct 2005

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to make it down to Seattle for No Fluff Just Stuff.

The conference was excellent and I came away with an excess of ideas.

Sessions I attended (i don’t have my notes handy so my comments are based on what I remember of the topics):

Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep – Dave Thomas : Excellent speaker and informative talk.

Unit Testing with Jython – Stuart Holloway : Cool ideas, I like the idea of easily being able to run a superclass test against all of the implementing sub-classes. The talk didn’t really focus on the specifics of unit testing java but more on how you can play with the execution semantics of python/jython to make life more interesting.

Stretching Java – Bruce Tate: Good speaker and talk. A little anti-java but having had experience with Ruby/Rails, a lot of his commentary had basis.

Keynote – Jason Hunter: Talked about his experiences with Sun, Jakarta and how Tomcat came to inception. Interesting.

Being Productive with Java in the Enterprise – Ben Galbraith: Another good talk. I like the concept of picking an enterprise stack (something that .NET gives you by default, but you’re forced to choose best of breed in J2EE-land) and having resources dedicated to the stacks extension.

Ruby on Rails – Dave Thomas: Excellent talk. Gave the ‘look what i can do in 5 minutes’ demonstration of bulding a CRUD app in Rails.

A Pragmatic Look at Agile Architecture – Mark Richards: Decent talk, it did have relevence to the goings on at work.

Ajaxian JavaScript Frameworks – Ben Galbraith: Actually wasn’t all that fond of the talk. I didn’t attend the previous timeslot’s Ajax talk so I missed the cool stuff. What I did catch was just a discussion of what exactly xmlRequestObject is and how these frameworks work which I already understand to a certain degree.

The Fallacies of Enterprise Systems – Ted Neward: Ted’s a good guy. The talk went over a list of 11 common falacies when developing enterprise systems and, in my opinion, they were all bang on. It’s obvious what they are, but in development-land we tend to take a lot of things for granted without realizing the implications.

Introduction to Web Services, 2005 Edition – Ted Neward: Talked about the latest WS standards, web services shouldn’t be used for RPC, etc. I don’t have too much experience or interest in web services right now but it was interesting to attend the talk.

J2EE Command Pattern – Mark Richards: Extremely relevant to my work and it was actually a very good concrete talk.

Ruby on Rails – David Geary: I wanted to end the show with a fun presentation. Unfortunately and largely because I attended Dave Thomas’ talk on Rails, this was not it. David took the same approach as Dave and went through a short demonstration of the different pieces. I had to cut out early to make it back to Canada so I’m not sure if the two presentations ended up diverging.

In a show like this it was difficult to attend all the sessions I wanted to due to conflicts. There was a huge underlying push towards Ruby/Rails but that didn’t distract too much from the Java/OSS nature of the conference. Unfortunately the speaker slated to give the Advanced Hibernate talk had a wife about to give birth and was unable to give the talk (I was really looking forward to the talk but perhaps I’ll find something equivalent from JavaZone/JIA or JavaOne Online).

All in all, an excellent show and I look forward to going back next year. Favourite Speakers: Dave Thomas, Bruce Tate, Ted Neward.