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by Chris Winters.
Original Post: NFJS day 2
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After being so timely with the day 1
summary I'll have to play catchup for the No Fluff Just Stuff days
2 and 3 before the information seeps out of my brain.
And before you ask: any criticisms and praise I have in here (and
in Days 1 and 3) have already gone into the speaker
evaluations. Feedback is not just good for agile development, and if
the speakers are going to change their presenations as a result of
comments then we're helping our fellow developers down the line,
right?.
Day 2 started off with Dave Thomas discussing mock
objects. Excellent presentation that outlined not only what mock
objects are, but also when and when not to use them. I was happy to
see that he liked EasyMock for
dynamic mocks, and that at least one of my co-workers attended. (I'm
trying to get them infected...)
Next was two senior engineers from Sun (John Crupi and Dan Malks)
discussing patterns. (Both are also authors of the recently updated Core J2EE
Patterns book. They were fairly comfortable speakers (John moreso
than Dan) and had a lot of experience to draw on as they went through
the patterns they added to the 2nd edition of the book and how they
connected to the rest of them. The disparity between the room and
screen size made their graphics very difficult to read, and I would
have liked to see more implementation discussion at the expense of
covering all the patterns.
After lunch a panel with a number of the speakers answered
questions from the audience. It eventually got to the "Can we trust
Sun?" and "Will Sun be around?" area, which sucked for the one Sun guy
(John Crupi) on the panel since he got pounded from the panel
and the audience. Other than that there was entertainment all
around, including the unintentionally funny discussion of user groups
that Mark
already mentioned. (Yes, we can be that juvenille...)
My third session was Stuart Halloway's 'Exploring Tests'. Basically
it's learning about third-party libraries by writing code. Many people
do this, including me. The interesting part is treating this code like
all code you write: be able to automatically build and run it, keep it
in version control, continuously integrate it. The point is that this
code represents what you know about a library when this library gets
updated you'd like to know what knowledge of yours has broken. Good
stuff, and he is such a good speaker. (He has a paper online
about it.) Two more co-workers attended, the testing virus
spreads...
The last session of the day was about JDO. It was interesting, but
not very much new besides what will happen in version 2.0, and nothing
that will sway me into using JDO right now over Hibernate.
Saturday night we went out to a nearby Japanese
place and had way, way too much food. Something about an expense
account... After that we just came back to the hotel and watched a
surprising Pitt victory over Virginia Tech.
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