Favorite Talk?

[Jared Richardson]

At the last NFJS you attended, what was your favorite talk? Was it the
content or the speaker (or both) that you liked?

Jared

[Brian Hurley]

The last NFJS that I attended was the one in Dallas this year. My
favorite talk was the keynote Ancient Philosophers & Blowhard
Jamborees by Neal Ford. He must have worked at my company at one time
to get this material.

What I got the most from is either the session about Hiberate by Brian
Sam-Bodden or the TDD discussion with Neal. Both session has
affected my programming skills for the better since I attended the
conference.

See my Blog for my summary of the conference:
http://infinitedata.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html

Brian


On Aug 5, 1:54 pm, Jared Richardson <jared.r.richard...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Dave Klein]

I don't want to say what my favorite talk at the Green Bay NFJS was because I wouldn't want it to go to someone's head, but I will say that a great talk that I got some very useful information from was Mark Richards' Transaction Patterns.  I found out there, that we are doing some things very wrongly and now I know how to fix it. 

Dave

[tdis...@gmail.com]

My favorite session was coincidentally the first session I attended in
the April Conference (though that does sound kinda lame...:) ):

10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
Richard Monson-Haefel

Richard did a great job of first bringing up points and then
explaining why they are there and what we as software developers/
architects can do in
order to satisfy those points. And, the 10 points that he presented
were all correct, even though they were sometimes contrary to "common
sense". Though I really liked Richard's presentation style, his
content was the better part of this presentation (and the best part of
the conference).

[Jared]

On Aug 8, 2008, at 2:17 PM, tdis...@gmail.com wrote:

>
> My favorite session was coincidentally the first session I attended in
> the April Conference (though that does sound kinda lame...:) ):
>
> 10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
> Richard Monson-Haefel
>

I've heard this from several people... sounds like I should make time
to attend it. :)

> Richard did a great job of first bringing up points and then
> explaining why they are there and what we as software developers/
> architects can do in
> order to satisfy those points. And, the 10 points that he presented
> were all correct, even though they were sometimes contrary to "common
> sense". Though I really liked Richard's presentation style, his
> content was the better part of this presentation (and the best part of
> the conference).

What were a few of the points he made?

Jared
http://AgileArtisans.com

[Jeff Grigg]

The most moving and challenging NFJS presentation I ever attended was
on the Seaside web framework, which is based on continuations. It's a
mind-bending idea. Now some Java frameworks are offering this kind of
functionality (...with patches to the JVM).

It's a VERY INTERESTING concept!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside_(software)

[Alex]

RIFE (http://rifers.org) implements continuations but it doesn't patch
the JVM, just uses bytecode modification. Kilim, the message-passing
concurrency project for Java (http://www.malhar.net/sriram/kilim) does
something vaguely similar as well, although through compile-time
weaving. John Rose has been discussing continuation support at the
JVM level (under the JSR 292 umbrella) but I'm not sure what the
current state of it is.

Geert Bevin did a talk on RIFE continuations (and other stuff like
Android, Terracotta, and GWT) in his talk at JavaOne this year if
you're interested in what they are or how the work in RIFE:
http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/j1sessn.jsp?sessn=TS-6213&yr=2008&track=coolstuff

Alex

[tdis...@gmail.com]

On Aug 8, 1:35 pm, Jared <jared.r.richard...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What were a few of the points he made?

The first one that I found contradictory but then totally made sense
was:

"All solutions are obsolete"

And then, Richard went further to discuss that the more time you put
into a solution,
that's more time that will become obsolete. This whole point works
very well with PP's YAGNI
principle. Basically, the "solution" is to keep work products in
small enough chunks
so WHEN they become obsolete, they are easy enough to replace.

I went through the other 9 points and most of them make some sense.
What I like about
Richard's talk is that while these points made sense to me, he gave
them other spins that
I didn't even consider. Which is what NFJS is all about, broadening.

[DaveKlein]

Since I've been to a bunch of NFJS events, I thought I'd post on my
favorite session over all. And that would have to be the Speaker
Panel. I've seen about a dozen of them and they are always insightful
and entertaining. Well, Ok, mostly just entertaining but I have
picked up some useful tidbits of information in between the bouts of
side splitting laughter.

However, I do think Jay should cut back on the "two word response"
thing. It's a good ice breaker but can take too much time away from
questions / answers. Unless, of course the crowd is as dead as we
were in Green Bay. :)

Dave

On Aug 5, 1:54 pm, Jared Richardson <jared.r.richard...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Brian Sam-Bodden]

I would love to be Fedex'ed somewhere but then I run the risk of being
placed in the same box as Jared. Then again it would be quite ironic
to have the author of "Ship it" in a box
We also thought of the NFJS party bus (the sad, short version of the
girls gone wild bus ;-) but who would want to share a bus ride longer
than 30 minutes with Ted Neward?

On Aug 13, 6:34 am, DaveKlein <kickindownthecobblesto...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Joe Sondow]

In Princeton this year I have to give another thumbs up to Neal Ford's
artful, inspired, and funny talk Ancient Philosophers & Blowhard
Jamborees. That was a highlight. For the regular sessions the most
memorable and cool for me was Filthy Rich Clients with the Google Web
Toolkit, Part 2 by David Geary.

In both cases they stick in my mind because of the combination of
excellent material and an excellent speaker. Without both of those
things I usually don't feel thrilled and inspired by a talk.

[Ian Molee]

> At the last NFJS you attended, what was your favorite talk? Was it the
> content or the speaker (or both) that you liked?

Well, Jared's talks were amongst my favorite, since it's through his
Career 2.0 talk that I heard about this list. :-) Although, that's
not what made his talks my favorite. I enjoyed the content of both
his Techniques 2008 and Career 2.0 talks greatly--especially the
Techniques talk, since I learned of the existence of a few tools that
I'd previously been unaware of--but what really puts his talks over
the top is his approachable, yet inspirational style. If you leave
one of his talks without thinking of a hundred things that you'd like
to do, and which seem like common sense, but which you just haven't
realized, then you haven't paid close enough attention! It's this
kind of speaker that really engages my interest and inspires me to
action from which I think I derive the most value. Potentially, at
least, since value is really in the action that the talk attempts to
inspire.

Additionally, I ended up attending more Neal Ford talks than anyone
else's, largely because the topics he was scheduled to cover most
acutely piqued my interest. The three Metrics, TDD, and Productive
Programmer talks were excellent and most enlightening. His speaking
style is different from Jared's, but no less entertaining and
effective. I found myself writing down quotations that captured the
essence of a situation, even if they weren't related to the main
thrust of the talk, like when--during the Productive Programmer talk--
illustrating the distractive capacity of all the useless notifications
that Windows produces, he likened it to "a bored three year old"
that's always yammering away. :-D And, from a purely aesthetic
standpoint, it was clear that Neal enjoys the process of producing the
slides, as they're well composed and use great clip art.

And, although I already had familiarity with a subset of the talk,
Venkat Subraminiam's talk on Functional Programming on the JVM was a
highlight because of the efficiency with which he can deliver
information--he's a real dynamo, and listening to him speak is a
pleasure.

Honestly, it's difficult for me to pinpoint a "favorite" talk, because
any time you can interact with individuals who are so expert in their
fields that they make it appear effortless, it's bound to be
educational and inspirational. This first-time NFJS attendee is eager
to incorporate what he learned into his daily life at work (and
outside of work), and looking forward to the next time I attend a
NFJS.

Heh, inspired by Jared, I think I'll incorporate this response into a
weblog post. :-)

[Dave Klein]

Ian, 

Thanks for the feedback.  This question is a tough one when there are so many good talks at your average NoFluff conference.  I am often tempted to answer "My favorite session is the one that started Friday afternoon and ended Sunday evening".

Please send a link to the list when you get that blog post up!

Dave

[Jared Richardson]

On Sep 26, 2008, at 12:33 PM, Dave Klein wrote:

> Thanks for the feedback. This question is a tough one when there
> are so many good talks at your average NoFluff conference. I am
> often tempted to answer "My favorite session is the one that started
> Friday afternoon and ended Sunday evening".

I don't know Dave... I was pretty happy with his answer. ;)

heh

Jared
http://NFJSOne.com
http://AgileArtisans.com

[Jeff Grigg]

My favorite talk of all technical conferences I've ever attended was a
Seaside framework talk by Mark Volkmann, at the Gateway NFJS
conference in Saint Louis, a couple of years ago. It changed my mind
about how web servers SHOULD work, and introduced me to the concept of
continuations.