I just came back from 10 days in Malmö, Sweden, for the Øredev conference. I’ve had a great time. Part of that was because I had Stella with me, and she got to meet all my conference-friends, so that was nice.

But a big part of it is basically just the fact that Øredev is an outstanding conference.

Some of my impressions, things I learned and did in no specific order:

• Hadoop is really cool and I wish I had time to learn more about it. Alex Loddengaard from Cloudera did a very good job introducing this technology in his tutorial. We got to do way fun stuff!
• People liked my talk about Ioke - and I was very happy with how it went too.
• Stuart Halloway is really good at introducing Clojure - I’m looking forward to his talk at QCon SF even more now.
• Me, Tyler Jennings, Neal Ford, Dan North and Stuart Halloway spent several hours of BoF time to create a new BDD framework for Clojure - this was way fun hacking, interesting from a group management and design perspective and just plain fun. There is a distinct possibility that me and Neal will give a talk at the TW US Away Day about this, if anyone is interested.
• Ze Frank is amazing. Really great evening keynote/entertainment.
• Niclas Nilsson and Hans Brattberg did a very accurate depiction of common problems and failure modes of pair programming. Good stuff.
• Tyler Jennings gave an introduction to Software Craftsmanship. Glad I didn’t miss this presentation. Very nicely done.
• Kevlin Henney did a great presentation about agile modeling. I enjoyed it a lot.
• We did a very fun closing panel that was basically just six geeks disagreeing about lots of stuff. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as the panel members.

Conclusion: Øredev was a great conference, I was honored to get the chance to speak there and I’ll definitely try to go back next year.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, malmö, oredev, presentations. | #

Late this Saturday I came home from a hard week in Århus, Denmark. Of course, it’s been a great week but it is definitely a change coming back home after it.

JAOO this year was great, just as you can always expect. What makes JAOO so fantastic is the combination of extraordinary presentations of all kinds, together with the socializing with all the fantastic speakers, and hanging out with the JAOO crew. All in all it’s a lovely time, and I never get enough sleep for some reason.

This year ThoughtWorks was there in force - we had about 12-14 people there, and 8 of us presenting. It’s always fun to be surrounded with TW people.

I’ll not go through the whole schedule, but I do want to share some of my favorites.

Rich Hickey was there, presenting about different aspects relating to Clojure and concurrency. As usual he was excellent, and I heard many good comments about both his presentations.

Intentional Software presented their Language Workbench, which I’ve been playing around with for some time. The presentation generated substantial shock-and-awe from the audience, which was fun to see.

The Tuesday featured the concurrency track, where I spent most my time. The whole track was very good, but it was capped off by Simon Peyton-Jones excellent talk about Nested Data Parallelism in Haskell, a very good presentation that meshed well with my interests. Simon is also a highly entertaining presenter. All in all, that presentation was definitely my favorite one this year.

On Wednesday the two presentations that stands out in my mind was Aino’s about design patterns - interspersed with dating design patterns. Very funny. And the other was by my colleague Richard Durnall, talking about lean.

Very nice stuff, all in all. Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons gave another version of their DSL tutorial the following day. It’s amazing how much this tutorial have evolved since I first saw it.

On the Friday I saw parts of Sam Aaron’s Advanced Ruby tutorial; it’s good. I also gave my tutorial, which went fairly well too.

And that’s JAOO in a nutshell. A great week. It’s weird to come back after such an intense time.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: aarhus, conferences, jaoo, presentations. | #

There hasn’t been much interesting happening this summer, but the fall is shaping up to be pretty busy. I will be talking at several different conferences, and thought I’d mention when and where I will be appearing.

First, this week I’m presenting at JavaZone in Oslo. I will present at 11:45 tomorrow, talking about Ioke.

Next week is the JVM Language Summit in Santa Clara. It is shaping up to be a great collection of people with many interesting discussions and talks. Take a look at the details for the talks. The people there are some of the most experienced language developers and implementors in the world. It should be a blast. I will do a talk about Ioke, and also a workshop about the challenges of improving Ioke’s performance.

After that I will attend RubyFoo in London, Oct 2-3, where I will talk about JRuby. RubyFoo will feature Matz, Sam Aaron, Aslak Hellesøy, Adam Wiggins and me. It should be great fun!

At JAOO this year (Oct 4-9 in Aarhus, Denmark) I will do a tutorial about testing Java code with JRuby. This conference also looks like it will be great. Many interesting talks and speakers. And of course, JAOO is generally the best conference I’ve ever been to.

At Øredev in Malmö, Sweden (Nov 2-6), I will be talking about Ioke.

And finally, at QCon SF in San Francisco (Nov 16-20) I will be hosting a track on emerging languages. After JAOO, QCon is my favorite conference, so I think it will be very nice too.

So, several interesting conferences coming up. Hope to see many of you there!

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, conferences, jaoo, javazone, jvm language summit, london, malmö, oredev, oslo, presentations, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyfoo, san francisco, santa clara. | #

This Wednesday I gave a talk about Ioke at the Chicago ACM. This was actually great fun and I’m fairly happy with the presentation. This is without doubt the best quality Ioke presentation available so far.

You can see it here: http://blip.tv/file/2229441

And here: http://blip.tv/file/2229292

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: ioke | tags: acm, chicago, ioke, presentations. | #

The Bay Area Clojure user group threw a special JavaOne special, with Rich Hickey as special guest on Wednesday afternoon. I went there and it turned out to be a large collection of former and current ThoughtWorkers there, among all the other Clojure enthusiasts. The model was lightning talks for a while and then general town hall with Rich answering questions. The reality turned out to be a bit different - firstly because people spent quite long on their talks, and people asked many questions and so on. The second problem was that the projector in the place had some serious problems - which basically ended up resulting in everyone projecting pink tinted presentations.

There were several interesting talks. The first one took a look at what the Clojure compiler actually generates. This turned a bit funny when Rich chimed in and basically said “that doesn’t look right” - the presenter had simplified some of what was happening. I don’t envy the presenter in this case, but it all turned into good fun, and I think we all learned a bit about what Clojure does during compilation.

There was a longer talk about something called Swarmli, which was a very small distributed computing network, written in about 300 lines of code. I defocused during that talk since I had to hack some stuff in Ioke.

After that, one of the JetBrains guys showed up the new IntelliJ Clojure plugin. It seems to be quite early days for it still, but there is potential to get good cross language refactoring, joint compilation and other goodies there.

Finally, my colleague Bradford Cross did a very cool talk about some of the work he’s currently doing at a startup. The work seems to be perfectly suited for Clojure, and the code shown was very clear and simple. Very cool stuff, really. ThoughtWorks - actually using Clojure at client projects. Glad to see that.

After that it was time for Rich Hickey. Rich decided to give a lightning talk himself - about chunked sequences. Very cool in concept, but actually one of those ideas that seem very simple and evident after the fact. Chunked sequences really seems to promise even better Clojure performance in many cases - without even requiring changes to client code.

After that there was a general Q&A session, where questions ranged all over the map, from personal to professional. One of the more conentious things said was about Rich’s attitude to testing. This caused lots of discussions later in the evening.

All in all, this was really a great event. We ended up at a nearby bar/restaurant afterwards and had long discussions about programming languages. A great evening.

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: clojure, javaone, presentations, san francisco. | #

The second day of JavaOne ended up being not as draining as the first one, although I had lots of interesting times this day too. I’ve divided it into two blog posts - this is about what happened at JavaOne, and the next one will be about the Clojure meetup.

The first session of the day was Nick Siegers talk about using JRuby in production at Kenai. An interesting talk about some of the things that worked, and some of the things that didn’t work. A surprising number of decisions were given as fiat since they needed to use Sun products for many things.

After that Neal Ford gave a comparison between JRuby and Groovy. I don’t have much to say about this talk except it seemed that some of the things seemed to be a bit more complicated to achieve in Groovy, than in Ruby.

As it turns out, the next talk was my final talk of the day. This was Bob Lee (crazy bob) talking about references and garbage collection on the JVM. A very good talk, and I learned about how the Google Collections MapMaker actually solves some of my Ioke problems. I ended up integrating it during the evening and it works great.

The second day had fewer talks for me - but I still had a very good time and even learned some stuff. Nice.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: java, javaone, jruby, presentations. | #

I’ve been spending the last few days in San Francisco, attending CommunityOne and JavaOne. We are right now up to the second day of JavaOne, so I felt it would be a good idea to take a look at what’s been going on during the first two days.

I will not talk about the general sessions here since I as a rule avoid going to them. So, I started out CommmunityOne seeing Guilloume talk about what is new in Groovy 1.6. Pretty interesting stuff, and many useful things. Although, one of the things I noted was that many of the default usages of AST transformations actually just make up for the lack of class body code. Things like “@Singleton” that neeeds an AST transformation in Groovy, is a very simple thing to do by executing code in the class body in Ruby.

After that I saw John Rose talk about the Da Vinci machine project. Pretty nice stuff going on there, really. The JVM will really improve with this technology.

Charles Nutter did a reprise of his Beyond Impossible JRuby talk. It’s a really good talk that focuses on the things that you really wouldn’t think possible to do on the JVM, that we’ve had to do to get JRuby working well.

Guido talked about Python 3000 - much of that was really a look at the history of Python, and as such was really interesting. Unfortunately, my jetlag started to get the better of me at that point, so my focus could have been better.

For me, the first day of JavaOne started out with the Script Bowl. This year the languages represented was Jython, Groovy, Clojure, Scala and JRuby. I think they all did a pretty good job of showcasing the languages, although it’s very hard to do that in such a small timeframe. I think I sympathized the most with Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) - the reason being that the Clojure model is the most dissimilar from the rest of the languages. But this dissimilarity is actually the key to understanding why Clojure is so powerful, so if you don’t understand it, you’re just going to be turned of by Clojure’s weird surface semantics. (Hint: they are not weird, they are necessary and powerful and really cool). Rich did a valiant effort to conveying this by talking a lot about the data structures that is Clojure, but I’m unsure how much of it actually penetrated.

Tom did a great job with the JRuby demos - he had a good flash 3d game running using a JRuby DSL, and then some slides showcasing how much benefit JRuby gets from the Ruby community. Good stuff.

After that I went to Rich’s Clojure talk. I’ve seen him give similar talks several times, but I don’t get tired of seeing this. As usual, Rich did a good job of giving a whirlwind tour of the language.

After lunch I went to the talk by Konstantin about JetBrains MPS. I was curious about MPS since I’ve been spending time with Intentional lately. I came away from the talk with a pretty different view of MPS compared to going in, actually. My initial reaction is that MPS seems to be pretty limited to what you can do with Intentional.

Then it was time to see Yehuda Katz talk about Ruby - this was a great intro to Ruby and I think the audience learned a lot there.

The first evening of JavaOne was really crazy, actually. I ended up first going to Brian Goetz and John Rose’s talk about building a Renaissance VM. This was a bit of an expansion of John’s CommunityOne talk, and gave a good overview of the different pieces we’re looking at in JSR 292, and also other things that should be in the JDK in some way to make a multi-language future possible.

Tobias Ivarsson gave a BOF about language interoperability on the JVM. This ended up being more about the interface injection feature that Tobias has been hacking on. We had some pretty good discussion, and I think we ended up with a feeling that we need to discuss this a bit more - especially if the API should be push or pull based. Good session by Tobias, though.

And then it was finally time for my BOF, called Hacking JRuby. This was actually a pretty mixed things, containing lots of funny small pieces of JRuby knowledge that can be useful if you want to do some weired things with JRuby. The slides can be found here: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/talks/HackingJRuby.pdf. I think the talk went pretty well, although it was in a late slot so not many people showed up.

The final session of the day was a BOF called JRuby Experiences in the Real World. This ended up being a conversation between about 10-12 people about their JRuby experiences. Very interesting.

After that I was totally beat, and ended up going home and crashing. So that was my first day at JavaOne.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: clojure, communityone, javaone, jruby, presentations. | #

Currently sitting in a session on day two of the Google I/O conference. The morning opened up with the keynote and announcement of Google Wave, which is something that seems very cool and has a lot of potential. Very cool start of the day.

After that I watched Ben and Dion talk about Bespin. I hadn’t seen Bespin before - it was definitely interesting, although I will be hard pressed to give up Emacs any day soon.

During lunch I came up with a fun idea, but it required something extra. I talked to Jon Tirsen, a Swedish friend from his ThoughtWorks days, who is on the Google Wave team - and he managed to get me an early access account for Google Wave. So I spent the next few hours hacking - and was able to unveil an Ioke Wave Robot during my talk. It is basically only a hello world thing, but it is almost certainly the first third-party Google Wave code… You can find it at http://github.com/olabini/iokebot. It is deployed as iokebot@appspot.com so when you have your Wave account you can add it to any waves. Very cool. I do believe there is a real potential for scripting languages to handle these tasks. Since most of it is about gluing services together, dynamic languages should be perfectly suited for it.

Finally I did my talk about JRuby and Ioke - that went quite well too. The video should be up on Google sooner or later.

And that was basically my Google I/O experience. Very nice conference and lots of interesting people.

3 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, ioke | tags: conferences, google io, google wave, ioke, jruby, presentations, san francisco. | #

I spent yesterday in Berlin at RailsWayCon. It ended up being pretty small, but a very good conference both in content and attendants. I was impressed by the level of the people there, and I also liked the presentations I saw. Full disclosure, though - I was part of the program committee, so maybe it wasn’t that weird I enjoyed the content. =)

As it happens, I did three talks myself, so I didn’t see as many other talks as I would have wanted. Specifically, I missed Bristol’s talk about JRuby, and Stefan Tilkov’s talk about REST in Rails. Would have liked to see both of them, actually.

My first talk was the first of the day, about the JRuby internals. I was pretty happy with how that turned out, and I think the audience appreciated it too. There was way too much content for one hour, though, so I had to skip over some parts, such as how to build extensions and so on. If you’re interested in the slides, you can find them here: http://olabini.com/presentations/JRubyInternals.pdf.

After that I sat in on Naude talking about event driven programming from different perspectives. It gave a good introduction and overview to the subject.

Then it was time for me again, this time doing a talk about Ioke. I’m pretty with how that turned out too. Got a pretty good audience and nice questions. The slides are here: http://olabini.com/presentations/IokeForRubyDevelopers.pdf.

And finally, after lunch, I did my keynote about programming languages. That was great fun, really. It was basically a talk that summarized my views about programming languages and where I see them going - with a specific focus on Ruby. I had a great time, and hopefully the audience did too. The slides probably doesn’t make much sense without me talking - in fact, I’m not sure they make sense with me talking either - but you can see them here: http://olabini.com/presentations/ProgrammingLanguages-RailsWayCon-Keynote.pdf.

I saw Koz do a talk about good taste in how far you take ideas. It was a good talk about common sense - one of those things that are way to seldom heard.

And finally Bristol talked about good UI design - this was also a very interesting talk. I enjoyed it.

And then I flew out of Berlin.

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: berlin, conferences, presentations, railswaycon. | #

Today I’m sitting in Berlin, at the Berliner Congress Center, at a tutorial about BDD at the RailsWayCon. Berlin is pretty nice this time of year. Just wished I had some time to walk around.

The main problem with that is that tomorrow I’m doing three different talks, basically in a row. The first one is going to be a guide to JRuby internals. It’s a talk about how Ruby works, some tricky points, and then a guide to the source code and what is available in JRuby. The goal is for people to be able to go in and understand JRuby and start hacking on it after the talk.

After that I’m doing an Ioke introduction. This is going to be more or less the same as the usual Ioke presentation I’ve done two or three times now. It’s fun to see how people react to it, though.

Finally, I’m doing a keynote about programming languages. It’s going to be very interesting. I’m going to more or less talk about all those ideas about programming languages that I’ve been ranting about for a long time. Fun fun.

And then I fly to San Francisco.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: berlin, presentations, railswaycon. | #