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. | #

I will be doing two geek nights, organized by JAOO, in Aarhus, Denmark, and Copenhagen, Denmark. I will be talking about JRuby.

If you’re interested in the Aarhus event, it will be held on May 5th, and you can find more information and register here: https://secure.trifork.com/aarhus-2009/freeevent/register.m?eventOID=1845.

If you’re interested in the Copenhagen event, it will be held on May 6th, and registration and information can be found here: https://secure.trifork.com/aarhus-2009/freeevent/register.m?eventOID=1846.

Hope to see many of you there!

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: aarhus, copenhagen, geek night, jaoo, jruby. | #