Brugge Blog

One of the most dangerous time for a project is the day immediately after someone has been to a conference. They’ve been wowed by some new tool or technology and can’t wait to use it. “Man, we should be using WangDoogle4J instead of Struts. I went to a session about it, and it blows everything else out of the water. It is really cool!. And it’s going to have a second Alpha release real soon now.” Run away.

So now that a couple of weeks have passed since NoFluffJustStuff in Chicago, I feel like it’s safe for me to talk about the conference, because it was, as always, full of ideas to stretch your thinking, and my own post-conference excitement has mellowed to a safe level.

What I’ve come to like about these conferences is the mix of the expected and the unexpected. When I look through the session list ahead of time, there are enough things that look interesting that I now I won’t be bored. But I’ve come to look forward to the surprises just as much, the sessions I wouldn’t have considered, or that didn’t look that interested, but which open my eyes to something I’ve been missing.

Some parts that were high-points this year, and which I looked forward to ahead of time:

• Stu Halloway. He can bring just about any topic to life, so unless there’s something killer in the same time slice, I can bank on getting wisdom about something I hadn’t considered before. This time it was Javascript. A lowly language with a bad rap, this was a wakeup call to give it its due, especially if you want to do Ajax well. He also had a followon session on Prototype that gave me a better grokking of it in 90 minutes than I could have got in a day of reading the docs.
• David Hussman. This guy walks and talks the agile walk and talk, and at a deep level. He’s not about tool and technique formulas, but about listening, hearing, adapting, connecting, refining and growing, for the team, the individual, and the company. His message is hard to get across, because it’s not hard technology, but social dynamics. And yet he does, and he fields any question you can throw at him with honesty and thought, and I leave feeling energized.

Some parts that were unexpected, the pleasant surprises:

• NetKernel. It was described in the session summary as something that could give you a new way of looking at XML processing, but that turned out to be a bait-and-switch tactic (there has also been some revisionist history going on, because the presentation title on the NFJS site nows says nothing about XML processing, but the slides I have in front of me do). When the speaker, Brian Sletten, has six slides on “What the heck is NetKernel?” it’s clear that this is something that’s defying the categories we are used to. It felt like you were in the Steve Martin and Bill Murray skit, “What The Hell Is That?“, because just when you thought you had a handle on it, he would point out some other perspective, and you would go back to “what the hell is that?”
• Reflection basics. This was a Sunday session with Ted Neward, who knows more about whatever topic he’s talking about than you do (really, he does). Unfortunately, it ended up being a Reflection 101 session and didn’t get to some of the things the session summary had described (annotations, dynamic proxies) so I was mostly tuned out. But then at the end someone asked an innocuous question about classloaders, and Ted pointed out that you can get the name of the location where a class was loaded from, not from the classloader, but from the security system’s ProtectionDomain. Since that seems to be an equally interesting question when debugging strange errors (”where the heck did this class come from???”), I was amazed at how simple the solution was:
  
String classLocation = this.getClass().getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().toString();

  It’s little tidbits like this that fall out unexpectedly that remind me of the sometimes serendipitous value of conferences.

It is interesting to think of how much of the speaker lineup has changed in the past few years with the migration of many of those folks to Ruby work, but the speakers that Jay brings in are still really strong, well-prepared and engaging. As long as he can keep doing that, I’ll keep going back.