No Fluff Just Stuff Boston 2008 Overall Review
I’ve spent my weekend in Boston at the local No Fluff Just Stuff conference and I figured I’d write a little summary of what I observed and learnt over the weekend.
To start this was my first conference that I’ve attended besides some small ones while in College and University, and I have to say that it was both exciting and disappointing.
Heading into the weekend I was very excited to hear Brian Goetz and Ted Neward give talks about cool things like Java Concurrency, The Java Memory Model, Hacking the JDK, Scala etc, and I expected most people at the conference to be of the same mind set.
I found through talking with many attendees that most people seemed to share a different set of values as to what was important to them. I found this to be very interesting as it really showed me the difference between people who are developing for the “Enterprise” or big business and people like me who develop more for a technology based company.
When I heard people talking about Groovy and Grails I couldn’t understand why anyone would be so interested in a language that performed as poorly as Groovy (Yes I know it’s been getting better but when you start from incredibly slow, and move to just being a little less incredibly slow I hardly see this as an improvement) I started to see that there really is a difference between the enterprise developer and the developer.
I think this was an amazing aspect of this conference is that it really opened my eyes to the other side of the coin, to the developers that work hard to create the applications that we use every single day from our Banks, Insurance companies etc and the different set of requirements that their applications have to deal with then what I’m used to.
I also have to say that after this weekend I am VERY VERY glad to be working where I am. Some of the horror stories I heard from people as to how they have to work, the lack of tools support that they face, and an overall management’s lack of letting things change made me cringe in pain and a few times I just wanted to give them a hug to tell them that it would all be OK (Yes sometimes it really was that bad like the guy who told me they were still using Java 1.4.2 because his boss thought if it works don’t fix it!)
So after sitting back over the weekend and getting over the initial culture shock that I faced meeting a lot of these developers, I have to say that this conference helped me in a way I never thought it would.
Sure I learnt all about the Java Memory Model, and how I can modify byte code on the fly with tools like BCEL, but more importantly I learnt what other developers have to go through on a daily basis and what it’s like to be an Enterprise developer in the real world.
All I have to say to that is, thank god I don’t have to deal with that shit every day. Overall though I definitely would recommend this conference to someone working in the Enterprise world, I definitely got value out of it though with my talks with Brian and Ted and I have to say that if they weren’t there this show definitely would of been a wash for me. So thanks Brian and Ted for really opening my mind and eyes to some cool new ways of doing things.