I still haven't caught up on much sleep from attending the No Fluff conference past weekend, but I decided to keep my streak going and post a quick wrap-up.
The conference was a big win, as usual. As "long" of a weekend it may be, I always find it invigorating (and, perhaps, a bit depressing learning how much there is I don't know!). Although perhaps a bit unfair (because I thought they were all worthwhile), I'll list my favorite talks of the day (here's the full schedule, in case you're curious):
For Friday, March 20:
For Saturday, March 21:
For Sunday, March 21:
My favorite talk of the entire conference:
This session was notable for me because I went to several talks by speakers I hadn't seen before, like Ken Sipe and Stuart Halloway. Although I always enjoy seeing "the regulars" like Scott Davis, Neal Ford, Jared Richardson et.al., it was a nice change to see some new (for me) speakers (and excellent ones, to boot!).
During one of Stuart's talks, he showed a video of a visualization of Ruby on Rails (RoR) commit history (built using a tool called Ruby Swarms). It was quite interesting, especially towards the end (he said it occurred around April 2008, I believe) when they switched from using Subversion to Git for their source control. Git allowed them to be much more collaborative and accept changes from may more people. You can see this by the explosion of committers around that time. Very neat stuff.
One of the "frustrations" (if you can call it that) for me of this conference is that I am often forced to make hard choices about which talks to go to. Often, many of the speakers/topics overlap, and they don't repeat. It's the price you pay for having high density quality, I guess. It just really encourages me to go every time the roll around (2x/year) - and that's a good thing.
The other "frustration" (as I mentioned in an earlier post) is it really gets me thinking about plunking down for a Mac. But then I start thinking, hmmm... desktop? laptop? mini? Tough choices (and not really cheap ones, either). One of these days I will have to do it, though.
Usually, during the speakers expert panel talk on Sunday, they do a round-robin of what the speakers are reading. They didn't this time, but they did have some interesting non-technical books for sale. I picked up "Why We Make Mistakes" by Joseph T. Hallinan. I'm looking forward to reading that one.
Oh, and once more thing. My most profound takeaway (or at least the thing I'll be thinking about most) from the talk was Stuart's comments about how he felt Java was "end of life." He said the JVM has many more years left to it, but Java the language is really becoming a "legacy" language.
Have to think about that one (and maybe spend more time with Ruby and Rails!).
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