TUESDAY
Helped in Android Workshop - Ted Neward (asssted by Howard Lewis Ship)
I'd been messing with Android for about a month trying to prepare for this and was actually helpful the first half of the day. Without an actual device and some heads up on the workshop project, the SMS stuff in the afternoon left me struggling to keep up. Learned a cool way to test SMS without an actual device by starting up another emulator and using its id as the phone number to send a message to.
Android is very easy to get going with coming from a Java background. IntelliJ IDEA worked much better for me than Eclipse but Ted used command line for whole thing which worked well. I eventually fell back to IntelliJ though since it was what I was used to.
WEDNESDAY
*Effective Groovy - Hamlet D'Arcy
Best preso I saw and the conference. Hamlet went through many of the items in "Effective Java" and made footnotes on the "Effective Groovy" items that lined up. Great stuff. I plan to go through this with my team at Lexmark.
Code Generation on the JVM - Hamlet D'Arcy
First two libraries were Java based and less interesting to me but he followed them with Grails, Groovy++ and a couple more things about AST transformations that were interesting.
New Ideas for Old Code - Hamlet D'Arcy
He gave some good tips on dealing technically and socially with maintaining an legacy code base or situations where you don't like the code you are working with on a daily basis. He even went into how you deal with individuals that fight against TDD, Groovy and other technologies that we typically know are good but are hard to convince traditional developers to adopt them.
*Gaelyk Intro and Workshop - Tim Berglund
This was my first time seeing Tim talk and he was a lot of fun. He gave a good overview of Gaelyk (Groovy development on Google App Engine). He followed with a workshop where there were less than a dozen of us that stuck around for but he helped us build our own "Technology Radar" app with Gaelyk. Most fun workshop I did at conference.
Developer Productivity Power Ups on Mac OSX - Matthew McCullough
Great stuff here...I think. Matthew thinks and talks too fast for me to follow. He covered so much that I will have to go back through the slides one by one and google each item to figure out what they are. No ding on Matthew, I just can't keep up with him.
THURSDAY
Thinking in Git - Matthew McCullough
I was pretty tired in this session and as I said before, Matthew covers things too quickly than I can mentally follow I am afraid. That aside, I got some real gems from his talk. I have been struggling with using Git on SVN for several months. I hope to soon be able to full Git and become more comfortable. I'm an old SVN dog though.
JRuby in Depth (part 2) - Neal Ford
I went to the second part becuase I figured the first part would be too basic but the second part was too basic also. He may have been watering it down for his audience. I have already messed with JRuby a bit and learned little here other than that Neal thought Charles Nutter (creator of JRuby) should stop messing with Mirah (Ruby flavored Java language he is working on) and focus on JRuby.
Grails Workshop (part 1 and 2) - Dave Klein
I was assisting for this workshop and felt pretty confident with the material. It was slow for me (obviously) but from the participants comments etc. I think they all appreciated Dave's pace. If you are looking into Grails, Dave's "Grails Quick Start" book is a bit dated but goes slowly and is easy to follow. I guess it should be called "Grails Easy Start" but that doesn't sound very cool. Don't get me wrong, it's great book. Lots of "Quick Start" books don't do as good of job of helping new users. I suggest his book/sessions to anyone starting to look into Grails.
Griffon preso - Andres Almiray
Andres is a fun presenter. I saw him talk on Griffon a year and a half ago and wasn't surprised by anything. Griffon is a well thought out abstraction of Swing GUI apps (for me). I'm still not convinced there are enough resources out there to use Griffon effectively without building a working knowledge of Java Swing first.
FRIDAY
*Active MQ - Bruce Snyder
I would say this was my favorite technical talk. Bruce is a great speaker and REALLY went into ActiveMQ. We almost derailed him with questions and comments. Not much else I can say. This was the most technical preso I saw at ÜberConf.
*Active MQ, Common problems and solutions - Bruce Snyder
This was a follow up to his ActiveMQ talk and was also excellently technical. Some presos and NFJS feel very shallow but this felt like he really had a deep knowledge that he was willing to share with us. He also took several of our addresses/business cards and offered to mail us a copy of his "ActiveMQ in Action" book. My evaluation might go down if I don't get a book in the mail this week. ;)
Message and Concurrency using Spring - Bruce Snyder
Friday afternoon I was starting to slow down. This was the last talk I got to attend but it felt like a lighter version of his ActiveMQ talks from the morning. He did touch on RabbitMQ a small bit but I can't remember much new here. But blood was rushing to my tummy from a big lunch though.
In conclusion:
Top 5 sessions that I attended:
1) Effective Groovy - Hamlet D'Arcy MOST USEFUL
2) Active MQ - Bruce Snyder MOST TECHNICAL
3) Active MQ Common problems and solutions - Bruce Snyder
4) Gaelyk - Tim Berglund
5) Gaelyk Workshop - Tim Berglund MOST FUN
I enjoyed Android and Grails workshops but I'm biased...I was helping in them and I already had some knowledge of the technologies. One great thing about ÜberConf was that I didn't go to any "stinkers". Most NFJS conferences I have gone to in the past, I have wandered into at least one preso that I left early or wished I had left early. I had to sort the evaluations and I only saw a couple "flaming" evaluations.
All in all, the best NFJS conference I have attended and the most exhausting one I have worked at.
Hopefully I can see my buddies (Erik Weibust, Dave Klein, Ben Ellison) again and SpringOne2GX this year. But for now, I'm just going to try to recover some sleep and find ways to use what I learned before I forget everything!
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