No Fluff Just Stuff Twin Cities Spring 2009 Review

The Spring 2009 Twin Cities No Fluff conference was last weekend. I enjoyed the weekend seeing old friends and learning new things.

I have to give out some gratitude to Jay Zimmerman for putting the conference together and running the show. Every conference I've gone to has appeared to run flawlessly.

My experience in the sessions was excellent. I spent the first day listening to Ted Neward's talks about Java Platform Security and what we might see in Java 7.

For Java 7 it looks like there will definitely be significant performance improvements. Chiefly, the introduction of the G1 garbage collector seams to be generating the most buzz.

Java Platform Security is something that have been largely unaware of. Neward did a good job explaining some of the Java security APIs and how we can implement them in our applications today to make our applications less vulnerable to malicious attacks. One thing that stuck out as a good practice is to run a comprehensive set of tests on a Java application and see what permissions are needed and then modify the security policy to accommodate only those necessary actions.

I commented that the security session was a little bit dry. One of my friends commented that if I said it was dry it must have been...well what do people think of me?

Neil Ford gave his keynote "On the lam from the furniture police." It's a great talk. That was actually the second time I've heard it and it was just as much fun the second time as the first.

Day 2: Stuart Halloway's Programming Clojure talk left me very hungry to give Clojure a spin. I like what I see in Clojure over Scala. Both languages have me interested though. The things I really like about functional languages is the simplicity in which they express functions. Functional programs take very little space to express function. The example Halloway gave reduced a 10+ line method from Apache Commons into a single line of Clojure.

One question that came up in the functional language discussions is: when are the functional languages going to become the killer app? The need for functional programming seems to revolve around concurrent programming and multi-core CPUs. My thoughts are this: right now 2-4 core systems are common. By using only a single core we're realizing roughly half to a quarter of our systems' potential. I think that when 16, 32, and 64 core systems are more common, then we're only going to realize 1/16, 1/32, or 1/64 of our system's potential. Something amazing is going to realize that potential and at that point I think the bandwagon will begin to fill.

The next session that I found to be very informative was Ken Sipe's Java Memory, Performance and the Garbage Collector. Great content and great delivery. Ken Sipe is becoming one of my favorite speakers on the tour. Java memory management is something that I admittedly have treated with the cargo cult mentality of setting the -Xmx to 1Gb and hoping that the Out of Memory errors go away. I had never heard of tools like visualgc, but I think it will be in my tool box of Java memory tools. It's a very cool JVM memory monitoring tool. I think that a lot of the mystery behind the garbage collector will not be so mysterious anymore.

I attended Ken Sipe's Hacking-The Dark Arts. Hacking/security is an interest of mine so some of his content was not new to me. It was a good refresher on some of the more common security vulnerabilities--SQL injection and cross site scripting.

On day 3 I enjoyed Mathhew McCullough's Git talk. I've heard great things about Git and I'm even using it as a source repository at home. I'm really not using it effectively though. I think that I will be much more effective with it now.

Neil Ford's Domain Specific Languages and Regular Expression talks were very informative to me. I think that both of them gave valuable content.

I concluded the conference with David Hussman's talk on Lean agile development. If there's a speaker who knows how to end a conference on a nice tranquil note it's David Hussman. I always leave his talks feeling far more relaxed than anybody else.

The takeaway that I'm getting is what I've suspected in the agile space. It's getting crowded with people who don't understand what they are doing. I don't know how I feel about it. On one hand, people are improving the way they work and realizing tremendous value from adopting some of the agile practices. On the other hand, people are doing 'agile' things that don't make any sense to them and poisoning agility within their organizations.

Another thing that occurred to me is none of the new agile practices are all that new. They're only new to the space of software development.

I've been mulling over what will be the next thing in software development practices. I'm trying to think beyond agility. I don't know what it is, but I think something new is needed. I think it will need to involve more of an organization than just the business users and development.

I'm still digesting the conference experience as a whole. I enjoy NFJS, but I'm beginning to wonder which conference will be the first one that I take a pass on. I didn't decide to go to this one until I saw the schedule and decided that I could find a valuable session for each time slot. I don't know if that will be the case this fall. It will be hard to determine whether there is enough new content to justify going.

One thing I'd like to see are more sessions with deeper content. I'd like to see more 2 part or even all day sessions that really have a deep explanation of topics. The 90 minute expository sessions are good for some things, but I feel like I'm at a point where I want to come out of the conference really understanding the content. There were too many sessions where the content was abbreviated for time.

I found the conference to be valuable. I thought that all of the sessions that I attended were worth attending.