Cool list of presentations to go through

http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com/jspwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=GreatSoftwareEngineeringSpeechesAndPresentations

No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 - Dallas

I attended No Fluff Just Stuff last weekend in Dallas. To give you an idea of where I'm coming from.... though I've been doing JAVA related goodness for 10 years, this was the first JAVA conference I've ever attended. I live in the area where the conference was held, so there was very little travel necessary.

Sessions I attended ...

• Working with Rules Engines - Venkat Subramaniam
  
• Effective Teams (the dirty little secret) - Bruce Tate


• Automating Business Value with FIT and FITness - David Hussman


• Eclipse RCP - Scott Delap


• NetKernel : XML Processing for the 21st Century - Brian Sletten


• Google Web Toolkit - David Geary


• Spring Web Flow - Ben Hale


• Greasing the wheels of JAVA with Groovy - Scott Davis


• Eclipse projects you might not know about - Derek Lane

The Good stuff ...

• Attendees - a good mix of beginners and veterans


• Speakers - a good mix of presentation styles across presenters. I was able to refine my list of what I consider to be an engaging, valuable, presentation style.


• Full Electronic copies of the slides were provided in advance to help attendees decide which sessions to attend.

The Surprising stuff ...

• A majority of the presenters had powerbooks/macbooks.
• Ipods and an Xbox 360 were raffled off.


• Food was provided.

The Buzz

• Learning other programming languages (Ruby/Groovy/etc), ala the Pragmmmers' Knowledge Portfolio advice.
• Finding ways to deliver value beyond heads-down programming (customer interaction, business knowledge/value)

Conclusions
As a conference focused entirely on technical sessions, I found NFJS to be a superb value. I got quite a bit out of it, and the fact that it was available locally was a bonus (saving travel expenses).

New entries on Ways to Debug Code wiki page

Added some new entries (under the java section) to the http://netsmith.wikispaces.com/WaysToDebugCode page....

 

Another good reason to give DRY serious consideration while writing code....

Another good reason to give DRY serious consideration while writing code....

 

"That there is wide spread belief in this myth is unfortunate because I have found that violating design principles or writing overly complex code is often the stumbling block to achieving good performance. In this case, not following DRY left the String concatenation operation and subsequent HashMap lookup scattered all throughout the application. This has two knock-on effects. The first being that any operation that is a bottleneck will be difficult to find as the scattering dilutes or hides the effect. The second is that if you are lucky enough to find that an operation is a bottleneck, you will be obliged to troll through the code looking for every instance of that operation." - Kirk - 2006-10-08 The Java Specialists' Newsletter [Issue 134] - DRY Performance -  http://www.javaspecialists.co.za/

Using Virtual Sockets to Fix Software Broken by Firewalls

http://java.sys-con.com/read/216367.htm

Fwd: agile pres

How agile development at google works . . .

http://www.javamug.org/mainpages/presentations/AgileDevelopmentatGoogle-DallasJUG.pdf

Hierarchical Temporal Memory

On the subject of how the brain works (as theorized in the On Intellgence Book by Hawkins) and how that will be implemented in software/hardware by Numenta:

http://www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf

Spring Forward 2006 Presentations

http://www.chariotsolutions.com/javalab/presentations.jsp