I just got back from the No Fluff Just Stuff Reston conference, and I can add 3 more blogs to my Feed Demon. No Fluff, for reference, is the only Java conference I know of where the number of registrants is small, the speakers are high caliber and the point of the exercise is NOT to get drunk in the hotel bar and collect freebies from the vendor booths, but to drink from the firehose of good presentations until you can't take any more (which for me happened around the end of day 2 because I am WEAK I TELL YOU. WEAK. Ahem. Anyhow, it's cheap. It's informative, and it probably comes to a major city near you.
My new finds as speakers to watch and writers whose work I will now pay some attention are here with their blogs for your delectation:
- Ramnivas Laddad gave a *very* clean, well organized, and thorough talk on AspectJ. If his book on same is as well constructed as his talk, then it should be excellent.
- Justin Gehtland did well thought out work on Hibernate and Service Oriented Architectures. I probably saw more talks of his than anyone else, because his topics lined up with my interests. Since I was going to have to live with him as the guy covering stuff I wanted to see, it was a real treat to find his presentation style was comfortable and amusing. He's really a pleasure to listen to. Again, we'll see what his writing is like.
- Stu Halloway also gave some good talks. I wish I'd been able to be in 2 places at once on day 1 a couple of times, but other people REALLY liked him.
Lots of other good people spoke, but do you really NEED me to tell you that Dave Thomas is worth listening to about software? If you pay attention to people who talk about software, you prolly already heard of him. These three were the new finds for me.
It's interesting to me to see who the guys are that come out on the conference circuit. They seem to be of 2 flavors. The first, seasoned veterans with grey hair and professional combat boots. These are The Pragmatic Programmers, and Bob Martin (who wasn't there this time, but has been before). Guys who are java household words.
Then there's the rest of them. Mostly they're guys in their early middle 30s who, for whatever reason managed to connect themselves early in their careers with big projects, Eric Hatcher, who contributed heavily to ant. Jason Hunter apparently worked with the Apache group almost as soon as he graduated from college and has contributed to an impressive number of things; Tomcat, XQuery, Servlets. (He wasn't there this time either, but has been before.) Anyhow, then they each wrote a book or three and started consulting. Or possibly the other way around.
As I've said elsewhere, I find the independence of that life looks pretty alluring. The writing. The working on lots of independent projects for different kinds of people. As a programmer in my mid career who CAN write when only she will do so, I find the fiscal uncertainty of independent consulting pretty terrifying, but all of the writing and speaking stuff seems very possible. Very doable. So here the author sits in search of a topic. And the tin man only wanted a brain. I know, I know. I keep debating article topics for Doctor Dobbs and they all suck. At any rate, No Fluff was really excellent this year. And my rss aggregator gained a couple of new blogs.
Posted by karen at November 10, 2004 12:15 PM