The Dallas NFJS event for 2009 wrapped up yesterday evening. It had (unfortunately) been awhile since I had been to one of these shows and I gotta say that I really missed the boost that I get from hearing all of the good talk on software development.
First, what went well: I attended talks by Venkat Subramaniam, Stu Halloway, and Scott Davis on topics such as Scala, Git, Clojure, Groovy, and Grails. These guys are all good friends from NFJS events of years past and I always enjoy seeing and chatting with them. With the exception of Groovy and Grails (and to a much lesser degree, Scala), these were all somewhat new topics to me and it was great to learn something new that I believe I can start applying on my own projects today. Stu's Clojure talk in particular opened my eyes to how this deceptively cryptic LISP language could actually be easier to read than Java. In fact, that was a common theme among the language-oriented talks: How they remove the noise from Java. I also had my first chance to decypher Git and am considering using Git on a personal project.
I also think that my "Beyond JUnit" talk went much better than I had anticipated. It was the first time that I had presented that topic and I wasn't sure how well it would be received or how well it'd fit the time. It actually worked out very well and I think I'll try to present this one again someday.
What went not so well? Not much, really. My own talk on OSGi could've been organized better to fit the time allotted. I knew going into it that I probably wouldn't be able to cover it all, but I now see some opportunities to rearrange it to fit nicely in 90 minutes or less. As usual, my presence on the expert panel was somewhat lackluster--I often don't have strong thoughts or opinions on the questions being asked and when I do, one of the other panelists will have already stated what I was thinking and I hate to be a "me too" panelist.
The only other bad thing is that I arrived on Friday with a nasty headache and wasn't exactly the most social person in the conference--sorry if I was off-putting to anyone.
What could be improved? As I said, my OSGi talk needs a bit of reorganization to fit the time. For the most part, my live coding went well, but it was rushed a bit. My "Beyond JUnit" talk, while it went smoothly, could stand a bit of rework. There are other subtopics that I'd like to include in the talk and some subtopics that I might minimize or remove completely if I had to do it again.
I also think that as I select the topics to attend, I should mix it up better. NFJS is loaded with great speakers and topics, but I only stuck with 3 of the speakers and most of that was focused on language-oriented talks. I didn't realize that until the conference was almost over, but in hindsight, I should've mixed it up a bit more.
In summary, Jay and crew did an amazing job, as always and I am proud to have been a part of it. I am already looking forward to my next NFJS event, whenever/wherever that will be (Jay? Any thoughts on that? Hint hint hint).
Next up for me: Dallas TechFest 2009 in Frisco, TX. There I'll be talking about all that is new and exciting in Spring 3.0. See ya there.
