No Fluff, Just Stuff, Spring 2009 Day 1

First day of the"No Fluff Just Stuff" conference (Spring 2009, Boston). Always good to go to these - this is my 5th (in a row no less).

I went to to two fantastic talks by Ken Sipe, one on JVM Memory Management and another one on Debugging your Production JVM. He talked about some nifty tools bundles w/ the JDK (like jpid, jvmstat, and VisualGC, among others. I remember being at Sun (Javasoft), in the distributed computing group (makers of serialization and RMI) when Sun was starting to add instrumentation like this into the VM. It's amazing to see where it's gone (I haven't paid attention to it in quite awhile).

His Debugging your Production JVM focused a lot on VisualVM (which is very cool), and the rather amazing (and emerging) BTrace. I will definitely have to check all this out.

My third talk of the day was Ted Neward's talk on Advanced Platform Security. I don't usually have to mess with this, but it's always good (and interesting) to look in on this kind of stuff occasionally. You never know when you'll need the info.

Jared Richardson gave the keynote this time: Career 2.0. He's written a book on this, which I got as part of the conference package. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Going to these NFJS conferences always make me want to get a nice Mac (laptop or nice desktop). Most of the speakers use them, and I see they have good reason to. I'll just have to pull the trigger one day...