So, Oredev 2013 just finished. And what an awesome conference. So many great talks, and so many more awesome people.
My fun started a day before the conference. Jez Humble graciously allowed me to sit in on his pre conference workshop on Continuous Delivery. As a fan of the concept, and of the book, it was a nice to finally see the man himself talk about it. And of course, he didn’t disappoint. One of the great benefits of being there in person as opposed to watching the numerous online videos and reading the book is all the question and answers (yes, even in Sweden!) that prop up. Oh, and if you haven’t already got it, and you have something to do in delivering software projects, get this NOW: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912/
My Talk: ZeroMQ – A Whole Bunch of Awesome
The main conference started the next day. And my talk on 0MQ was right after the opening keynote. It was introductory material on Zero, and was also the first time I’ve used NetMQ (the .NET native implementation of the 0MQ protocol) in a public presentation. Apart from a coding *doh*, ZeroMQ just worked (as usual). The code from the demos are up at https://github.com/ashic/0MQOredev2013 , and the slides are here:
Other Technical Talks I Attended
Day One
After my talk, I headed over to watch THE Douglas Crockford do a talk on RQ. It seems like quite an elegant way to compose tasks in JavaScript, and the quickcheck like property based testing thing shown was very impressive. He mentioned a few other things that try to do similar things, but RQ definitely has an aura of simplicity. He also mentioned Rx, for which “there’s just no doccumentation”.
Next up was Mat-Olov Eriksson discussing how they process user interaction information and metric at a scale of 10 billion records a day. [Hint: log to files, and use messaging concepts heavily.] The details they capture, their metadata repository system, etc. were quite interesting. Oh yeah, and they hire lots of smart people to be data scientists, whether they already are data scientists or not. If it’s something that interests you, and you like Candy Crush, etc., then why not give them a call?
I then attended Jimmy Nilsson and Jon Gwyllensward’s talk on Less is More. They talked about how they implemented simplistic solutions to various problems, leveraging REST, asynchrony, and most importantly what made sense. Keeping things small, and independent was also emphasized. All of the talk made sense to me – but I’m biased as I tend to value the exact same things in my solutions as well.
Next up – Douglas Crockford again with Go To There and Back Again. It was a humorous talk about the discovery of stupid things in languages, the politics in language committees, future directions, and the notion that he’s sad that a language “designed in 10 days" (javascript) is now a major player, and even more so, that it “is still around”. Of course, the next prediction was that we’d all be dead, and JavaScript will not.
The last talk of day one was Oleg Zhurakousky with Go Beyond "Debug": Wire Tap your App for Knowledge with Hadoop. I was greatly looking forward to this one, and I have to say, it’s the only talk in the entire conference that disappointed me. The first fifteen minutes we entirely about implementing a proxy pattern with Spring. And the demos simply printed out to files, instead of HDFS. He did show that batching up in memory, and compressing before sending to disk allows you to use CPU and memory, and cause disk to be less of a bottleneck, but I was expecting Hadoop awesomeness. That simply wasn’t there.
Day Two
I started off with Kirk Pepperdine talking about low level performance aspects. It was a good talk, however, having attended Martin Thompson’s course, the material wasn’t anything new. Oh, and Java is ugly :)
Next was Rachel Reese talking about F# type providers. Type providers are cool. So is F# :)
After lunch, it was Jessice Kerr talking about functional principles for OO developers. This resonated with my views, and having to do a lot of work in C# (which is still way better than Java!), I think it’s important that those working with OO languages have better grasp of functional paradigms, so that they can at least get some of the benefits functional languages offer. Oh yeah, and Java is ugly. [If you’re on the JVM, I hear Clojure and Scala are much better]
My next session was Adrian Cole talking about Netflix Edge Architecture. It’s quite mindboggling the scale at which they operate.
Last talk of the day was Fred George with Implementing Programmer Anarchy. It was interesting seeing an updated version since Oslo last year. The talk is part of a pair (with the other being Microservice Architecture). I recommend watching both videos if you haven’t seen the talks yet.
The last talk of the day for me was Michael Larsen with Let’s Stop Faking It. It was quite a good one inspiring people to first identify their lackings, and then ways to overcome them.
The day ended with a keynote from Randall Monroe (XKCD). This is one of the best keynotes I’ve ever seen. It was fun, witty, hilarious – all of which I expected. What blew me away though, was the thought process that this guy has. Watch the video – you’ll know what I mean :)
Day Three
The next day started quite late for me, as I was spending quite a bit of time talking with other speakers and attendees. The first one I went to as after lunch – Tom Scott talking about CQRS and Event Sourcing. It was a good introductory talk, and it was great to meet up with him afterwards (and in the evening after the conference ended – Hi Tom!).
The next talk I attended was Jessica again with OO Design in the Wild. She drew on aspects of various languages, and promoted the main good things about OO (encapsulation, message passing, release-reuse, etc.), while inviting us to focus less on the class level principles that are kinda techie oriented. This has been the essence of OO Alan Kay style (and to a degree, the principles of CSP as well), and it’s time more people got that.
The conference ended with a keynote from Linus Walleij talking about Fairlight and The Scene.
Overall
The conference was very well put together, with great talks all through. The food was simply amazing, as was the venue (apparently, a reformed slaughterhouse!). It’s been a fantastic week, and I would like to thank Rikard & co. for inviting me over. Great job, everyone!!