No Fluff Just Stuff – Day One

15 Sep 2006

The day started with getting up at 4:00am, sending a few work emails, and getting into a van with 7 or 8 of my closest colleagues (I mean that in the literal sense… that van was small).

NFJS is being held in Redmond again this year so that meant catching the ferry from Victora -> Vancouver and driving down. Highlight of the morning was the Pacific Buffet on the ferry. On the way down I cracked open my e-book of Pragmatic Version Control with Subversion and read about a quarter of it. Good book, we’ve been running subversion for about a year now but I’d like to take the time to see if there’s anything we’re missing or could be doing more effectively.
One of the things that changed this year is that they’re giving away free long and short sleeved t-shirts instead of backpacks. Personally I like the shirts but a couple guys on the team were looking forward to backpacks. Too bad for them I guess, I’ll survive with the JavaOne backpack.

I started the day off with Brian Goetz’s Introduction to Java Threads. Unfortunately for me, I guess previous participants had rated Brian’s material too difficult and he had to de-scope his presentation. He had a full slide deck but barely got into the interesting stuff at the end. A quality presentation, but technically didn’t offer much that I wasn’t already aware off.

At JavaOne I heard good things about the Java5 concurrency talk but unfortunately wasn’t able to attend it then, but luckily Brian’s second talk of the day was all about the new concurrency framework. I won’t get into too many of the details here but it was an excellent talk. I left with a number of items that could be immediately integrated into the code base and an understanding of where the new concurrency utilities would simplify some of our homegrown threading utilities. Writing thread-safe code is a an interesting challenge, and Brian did a good job of covering the basics while getting deep enough to keep me interested.

Last talk of the day was yet another one of Brian’s, Improving Java code quality with code auditing tools. Sounded interesting enough. After picking up the slide deck, I noted that the talk was centered on FindBugs, a static analysis tool that I’d read about previously but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to play with. When I get back to the office, I’m going to try and find time to play with FindBugs and look into how it integrates with CruiseControl. It’s a useful utility and I have no doubt that it would catch bugs and improve overall efficiency. It’s amazing what you read about but don’t necessarily take seriously until someone credible shoves it in your face and says hey!, this thing works and here’s some hard results.

And with that came the end of day one. NFJS always has had good food in the past and it’s been so far so good again.