What could possibly go wrong? (GOTO Chicago)

At GOTO Chicago, I was given the chance to chat a bit about the presentation I was giving, which happens to be the same one I’m giving at a number of conferences this year (although of course I’m evolving it as I go along).

The presentation leaves very little time for anything other than coding, as it’s quite challenging to create a full app in 50 minutes, so it was great to have the chance to talk about the motivations for the demo

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The video of the actual talk is also available now:

<div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kmVnhyWqozA&#34; style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" allowfullscreen title="YouTube Video">

At the beginning it doesn’t clearly show the screen, but it does improve. You can see an earlier version from the Joy of Coding as well, so if something’s not clear on one of the videos, hopefully it’s better in the other.

The code for the Chicago version is on Github, and if you look through the history you can see how it builds up, the same as it does in the demo.

QCon London 2014

Wow. My 4th QCon London. That’s not bad. And every time, it’s a different experience (if you must, see my blogs for 2013, 2012, and even 2007 (part 1 & part 2 - how cute was I? "agile seems like a jolly good idea; automated testing appears to be important")).

I can’t even tell you what I did on the first day, I was mostly panicking about my presentation - I was inspired after my trip to New York last month to change my talk at the last (responsible?) minute and do a live coding session, something much more technical than my recent talks. I’ll leave the details for a separate blog post though, when the video comes out.

The thing that stands out for me from Wednesday though was Damian Conway programming Conway's Game of Life in Klingon. Yeah. Just find the video and watch it, the man is a genius.

Damian Conway, Life, The Universe, and Everything

The Thursday keynote was inspiring too from a totally different point of view - Tim Lister of Peopleware fame shared stories from his career, and I came away from that really happy I work as a technologist, but with an increased desire to learn off other amazing people.

Tim Lister @QCon London 2014

Not Only Java track - I’m on the programme committee for QCon, and this year we wanted to cover leading edge technologies (as always) but we didn’t want to slice things into strict technology silos (interruption: argh! the person in front of me nearly destroyed my laptop by suddenly moving their chair back! Why do people bother in economy on a morning flight?). So I wanted the Java track to be more representative of what today’s Java programmers care about - for the programmers of course, but also because I know there are architects and team leads at QCon who might not realise how things have moved on with the language, and how much polyglot programming we do these days.

Martin kicked it off with a great history lesson on the progress (or occasionally, lack of it) in Java. He begged us to study and understand Set Theory, to use async design, to think of the users of our APIs, and, most of all, to design nice, clean code.

Next up, Eva took us through the fundamentals of Garbage Collection - this might not seem like a cutting edge subject these days, but it’s one of the most misunderstood subjects for Java programmers. Eva gave us a really great, understandable view of the different types of garbage collectors, how they work, and their pros and cons. She left us with a call to arms to not simply let other people try and solve this problem, but to get stuck in and contribute ourselves, via the OpenJDK.

Trisha Gee @QCon London 2014

After lunch was my nerve-wracking live coding session, putting together a full stack end-to-end web app using AngularJS, HTML5, Java and MongoDB. It only went wrong twice, and people seemed to like it. I’ll post the video in another blog post as soon as it's publicly available. Code is available on github.

We’ve been playing with the open spaces idea at QCon. The Java one only had a few people in it, but that gave everyone a chance to speak at least. We covered Java 8 (the Good and the Bad); other JVM languages; and UIs for Java (Javascript or GWT?). And I plugged the work the LJC does in London, of course.

After this Bodil blew me away creating a My Little Pony game using RX in the browser. ‘Nuff said.

Finally, Simon Ritter gave us a view of the Java 8 features most likely to impact the way Java developers think about software design - lambdas and streams. I thought this was a really great introduction to the concepts if you haven’t seen them before, and with concrete examples that showed how we should be using them. If you're not already looking at lambdas and streams, you should be - even if you're not going to be using Java 8 yet, it's worth getting a heads up on how it's going to impact our programming style.

I’m very pleased with the way the Java track turned out on the day - every speaker was first class, a wide range of topics was covered, and I, for one, learnt something in every presentation.

To finish off the day, Emma Langman gave an awesome keynote about how people are the messy bit of your system, and how they’re never rational and you shouldn’t expect them to be. I also highly recommend this talk, especially if you’re a techy and you’ve found yourself in some sort of management or team lead position.

Sadly I couldn't stay for day three of the conference, I had to fly off to the Joy of Coding to re-give the live coding presentation there. Because, if you’re going to do something terrifying and doomed to failure, you might as well do it twice.

QCon is an expensive conference, especially compared to the developer-friendly prices of something like DevoxxUK, but for getting a big picture of where the industry is, of things you might be missing, for learning hard core technical skills and understanding the important of the fluffy-people-stuff, and finally for meeting a wide range of people from developers to CTOs, I think you'd be hard pushed to find something better in London. IMHO (and remember, I did disclose I'm on the programme committee).

And although it's really hard work putting together the programme for a track like this, and although both times I've said I'm Never Doing It Again, when it goes this well it makes you want to do it all over again. After a break. A looong break.

The Joy of Coding

I’m on a plane (there’s a surprise) on my way back from The Joy of Coding. It’s the title that attracted me to this conference, and it was a great little one day event with awesome people like Dan North, Erik Meijer and Dick Wall presenting. What I liked about the themes is they were broadly technology agnostic, pulling back to a level which made me remember why I’m a developer. It inspired me to do more research and more thinking, and less panicking and trying to write code. That might seem odd, as someone who goes to as many conferences as I do should get loads more research and thinking time than most developers living under the whip, but I seem to spend so much time bouncing from thing to thing I don’t get space to just sit and think, or to read things in any depth.

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Feel like an outsider?

The Java Dev Room at FOSDEM

So, FOSDEM.

I've heard great things about this conference, so I was pretty exited to go

Now I know people talk about impostor syndrome whenever they mention the woeful lack of diversity at tech conferences. Interestingly, I felt like an impostor at FOSDEM - not because I'm a woman (there were quite a few techy women around at FOSDEM, more than I expected) but because I'm not an open source person.

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YOW

December disappeared in a rush of vacation and a fleeting tour of Australia. It's hard to believe that it's the eve of Christmas Eve already, it's almost impossible to feel Christmassy when you're getting sunburnt on a boat and seeing people in swim-suits wearing santa hats. A mid-winter festival (complete with trees and fake snow) just feels very odd in summer.

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