NFJS Seattle – My experiences

24 Sep 2007

This past weekend the development team (all 18 of us) traveled down to Seattle for the annual Pacific Northwest Software Symposium (aka. NFJS Seattle).  Jay and the gang always do a great job with the tour and this year was no exception.  Much fun was had by all.

This was my third consecutive year at the conference and as always I left feeling motivated and better informed.  Ted Neward gave an excellent keynote on language development and what the next five years holds for developers (Why the next five years will be about languages).  I believe it was the same keynote that he gave at Jazoon07 and it was definitely well received here as well.

Day 1 was basically all Ted Neward.  I went to his talks on Classloaders and debugging.  The classloaders talk was excellent, debugging was interesting but the presented material was more of a refresher for me. 

Day 2 was all over the map.  Started out w/ Jason Hunters overview on Java6.  We’re waiting on official Java6 support for the Mac but it’s helpful to be aware of what will be available when we do migrate.  Venkat Subramaniam gave a couple of excellent talks about Fit/FitNesse and Java Annotations (*Annotation Hammer).  *Brian Goetz gave another talk on the Java Memory Model (saw it last year and thought it was excellent).

Day 3 was half Groovy and half concurrency.  There was a lot of talk at the conference around alternative JVM-based languages with Groovy being at the forefront of most conversations.  I’m looking forward to playing more with these dynamic languages (we’ve just completed a basic integration of Jython).  Brian Goetz gave a couple of talks around using concurrency effectively and structuring Java applications for concurrency.  Unfortunately we had to skip out early to (try and) catch a ferry so I only caught half of the Effective Concurrent Java talk.

Unfortunately the worst part of the trip came post conference.  We gave ourselves ~4hrs to get from Seattle to the ferry terminal in Vancouver.  Should have been plenty of time.  Unfortunately we miscalculated the effect of the high Canadian dollar on day trippers.  We hit severe grid lock about a mile from the crossing and sat for a few hours.  Eventually we gave up on the 9:00 ferry to Victoria and had dinner in Blaine, WA. Afterwards we managed to merge back into the border lineup and did make the 11:00 sailing to Nanaimo (about 1.5hrs north of Victoria).  So after about ~10hrs of travelling we made it home!

None the less it was totally worth the trip.  The conference was great, as were the extra cirricular activities. 

We actually have an internal hack day planned for next week so it’ll be interesting to see how many people take some of the material from NFJS and put it into practice.

Free WiFi at YVR Airport (Vancouver)

02 Sep 2007

Happened to be sitting near gate 38B and connected to a publicly accessible (and free) wireless hotspot.

Goodbye PC, Hello Mac

30 Aug 2007

As the title says, work has replaced my previous Dell Lattitude D620 with a new 15.4" MacBook Pro.

I’ve only had the MBP for a couple days now so I’m still getting used to OS X.  There’s a lot more to learn but my two day impressions are positive.  Even the girlfriend likes it (she’s wanted a Mac for awhile now).

I’ve been using Linux for the past 12 or 13 years so I appreciate the ease with which I can open Terminal.app and run the basic gnu tools.  All I need now is a nice multi-tab’d terminal application (a quick Google search brought up iTerm, which looks promising).

The past couple of years have been spent developing Java applications in Windows.  I used Cygwin extensively and honestly it was pretty good.  The JavaVM’s (Sun’s primarily although I usually used JRockit) seemed a bit more optimized for Windows and the application server started/restarted significantly faster.  Not the ideal benchmark but an important one given how much time we all spend doing deployments.  I should note that JRockit on Linux did perform faster in this regard than Sun did.

I’ve switched from using BlogDesk to Qumana for blog composition. It was interesting to see that Qumana is actually developed in Vancouver, BC. 

World of Warcraft installed without a hitch.

Quicksilver (and Spotlight to a lesser degree) provide a suitable replacement for the functionality that I was using Google Desktop for.  Namely, the ability to easily launch applications.

I don’t compose a lot of documents so I don’t think Microsoft Office will be a significant loss.  I’ve got NeoOffice installed but may decide to use Google Docs instead.

I’ve been on vacation for the past couple weeks so I haven’t had an opportunity to do any actual development on the new machine.  That being said, I was able to get my development environment setup without too much of a problem.  Fortunately some kind soul has made PostgreSQL binaries available.  IntelliJ IDEA seems to work equally well in OS X as it did in Windows.  The only downside from a Java perspective is Apple dragging it’s feet around support for Java6.  We haven’t migrated to it yet but Mac support is the gating factor.

That’s all I have to say for now.  It seems like a good platform for daily development and overall general usage.