I’ve just come back from several different conferences. It’s been tiring but also very rewarding. The conferences I attended and presented at was QCon San Francisco, RubyConf and JRubyConf. I thought I’d just mention some of the highlights from these three events.

First QCon – after JAOO, QCon is my favorite conference. They always manage to put together an interesting week with great speakers and lots of things to learn. This year, me and Martin Fowler did a full-day tutorial about domain specific languages.

During the Wednesday I spent most of my time hanging out and chatting with people. I did attend Josh Blochs and Bob Lee’s Java Puzzler presentation. This is always an entertaining hour. I also enjoyed Douglas Crockfords keynote about the history and future of JavaScript. Hearing how this all happened is always enlightening.

On the Thursday I had my track about languages. I think it went very well, my speakers did a great job. Eishay Smith talk about Scala, Stu Halloway about Clojure, Martin Fowler about Ruby, Jonathan Felch about Groovy and Amanda Laucher and Josh Graham about F#. I’m very happy with how it went, actually.

During Friday I mostly sat in on Neal Fords DSL track. My colleague Brian Guthrie started out with a strong hour about internal DSLs in various languages. Ioke got a few code examples, which was fun. After that Neal and Nate Schutta talked about MPS. I haven’t seen this much detail about MPS before so it was helpful.

After lunch Don Box and Amanda Laucher did a talk about the technology formerly known as Oslo. I didn’t think this tech was anything cool at all until I saw this presentation. In retrospect this was probably my favorite presentation of the conference. What came together was how you can use M as a fully typed language with some interesting characteristics, and also the extremely powerful debug features. It’s nice indeed.

Glenn Vanderburg put forward some arguments against language workbenches. This made for an interesting hour but I’m not entirely sure I buy his arguments. And after that Magnus Christerson from Intentional showcased what they’ve been working on lately. Very impressive stuff as usual.

I only spent one day at RubyConf, but it was still enough to get a feeling for what was going on, spend some time with several people I haven’t met before and so on. Good times. Charles Nutter did a very good presentation about his Ruby mutants (Duby and Surinx). After that Ryan Davis and Aaron Patterson did a hilarous presentation about weird software.

JRubyConf was a total success. All of the presentations were very interesting, and provided insight into what people liked about JRuby and what they wanted from it. It was fantastic to see so many people come together just for JRuby. It’s great to be part of that. I did a presentation about testing with JRuby, and then I was part of the closing panel. Both went well.

All in all a great week of conferences.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, jruby | tags: jruby, jrubyconf, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyconf, san francisco. | #

I’m gearing up for the next conference stretch. This time it’s San Francisco next week, and I really hope to see lots of people at these conferences – they are gearing up to be something special.

First QCon San Francisco. Except for JAOO, QCon is the best general developer conference I’ve ever been to. Go check out the schedule at http://qconsf.com. This year I’m very excited about doing a full day tutorial about domain specific languages together with Martin Fowler.

I’m also in charge of the languages track, where I have five people who will talk about their experiences with different languages. This time there will not be much introduction to the languages, but instead experience reports, objective descriptions of what worked, what didn’t work and how you can improve your chances of success. The languages covered are Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Groovy and F#. Should be great fun.

Hopefully I will have lots of time to see other presentations too. There are many I would love to see. ThoughtWorks also happens to be a sponsor of QCon, so there will be a booth where it’s a big possibility you can find me or my colleagues.

I will do one day of RubyConf – the Saturday. Funnily enough I haven’t ever been to RubyConf, so I’m looking forward to this too.

Finally, the first ever JRubyConf will happen next Sunday. The program looks really interesting. I’m going to be talking about testing, and also be part of the ending JRuby Core Team panel.

I’m very excited about these conferences. Hope to see you there!

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging, jruby | tags: jruby, jrubyconf, qcon, qcon san francisco, qconsf, rubyconf, san francisco. | #

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. | #

All in all, QCon London this year was amazing. I find it interesting that from the first time I attended QCon I thought they were exceptionally good. And every time they keep getting better. Of course, it is fantastic to be able to meet all these great people at the conference, and you get lots of chances to hang out with them, ask questions and have discussions. But if you take a look at the presentations offered, they all feel very fresh and the quality is consistently of a very high level.

I think the system of having track hosts that put together their own track is a fantastic idea, and I think it might be one of the reasons that there are ALWAYS more than one presentation going that you want to see.

The fact that the QCon crew from InfoQ and Trifork are all lovely people is not a negative either.

If you haven’t visited QCon, I really think you should. It is really very good, and I’m privileged to have been asked to present there more than once. I always have a great time and I hope I will be able to continue to come back there.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, presentations, qcon, qcon london. | #

The last day of any conference can sometimes get a weak schedule, since many organizers feel that people have a tendency to be wiped out after all the previous days of conference, and won’t be able to focus as much on the last day. Luckily, QCon and JAOO never does this – the last day is generally at least as strong as any other day. This time around I felt it was a very good day indeed. I saw Stefan Tilkov do a very deep presentation on his thoughts on the balance between generic and specific in architecture and development. Stefan shared his long experience in a funny and thoughtful way that contained lots of interesting insights. After that I managed to catch the last 10-15 minutes of Joe Armstrongs talk about Erlang. This talk was focused on systems that never stop, and Joe’s presentation was based on this, which changed the focus a bit. Sir Tony Hoare was in the audience during this talk, and one amusing moment was when he asked Joe a question about the tradeoff between timeouts and failing fast. Great stuff. This only happens at QCon and JAOO. (As an aside, the evening before I got the chance to sit down and have beers with Steve Vinoski, Joe Armstrong and Rich Hickey. This never happens at other conferences either.)

After the presentation, Hoare asked me if I was interested in being part of a panel during his after-lunch presentation. The presentation was about null references, which Hoare calls his billion dollar mistake. To be fair, I think it was one of those inevitable things, that would have happened sooner or later anyway. Ulf Wiger became part of the discussion, and presented a much better defense than my point about inevitability.

In the DSL track, Amanda Laucher gave a good overview about what Oslo is and why you might want to use it. What I was looking for here was just enough of a look at the tech to see if this is something worth investing more time in. My conclusion was that at this point in time, it doesn’t seem to give me much new that would help me. Especially the Mgrammar stuff seemed to be a not-invented-here copycat of Antlr. Martin corrected me about that, though, by pointing out that Mgrammar actually handles GLR grammars. My intuition is that ANTLRs LL(*) would be able to handle most of the same parses, but that’s not something I would bet money on. Mgrammar also doesn’t need semantic predicates to avoid left recursion, which can make the grammars more readable.

The last time slot of the day I spent doing some hacking, and peeking in at Glenn Vanderburgs presentation on DSLs in Ruby, which gave a good overview of the available techniques.

The day ended with the totally hilarious Bullseye panel, where my totally insane colleagues Dan North and Jim Webber hosted a gameshow combining darts and zany questions to a panel of Michael T Nygard, Ian Robinson, Martin Fowler and Steve Vinoski. To many great moments to even start to describe, but if I had to choose one, it would probably be Ian Robinsons answer to the question about what tech has the worst man boobs. Ian’s response basically said that the problem wasn’t the man boobs, but that he couldn’t actually get close enough to touch them without lots of clothes getting in the way. Lovely metaphors there.

4 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: bullseye, hoare, presentations, qcon, qcon london. | #

I started the second day quite late. There were a few sessions I wanted to see there but not enough to get out of bed early enough. After lunch I saw parts of David Pollaks talk on Lift. Lift is definitely impressive – you can achieve very powerful things very quickly with it.

After that, I saw Rich Hickey talk about Persistent Data Structures. This was without doubt the best presentation at QCon this year. Rich spent lots of time talking about identity, state and value. It was very good – you should go to http://qconlondon.com/london-2009/schedule/thursday.jsp and take a look at the slides for it. It is pretty deep stuff. I heard many other people share my opinion of the quality of this talk. QCon and JAOO could do much worse than getting Rich back for the next time.

Overall, I spent most of the Thursday having chats with interesting people instead of watching presentations. It was a good day in many ways, especially due to Rich’s talk.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: presentations, qcon, qcon london, rich hickey. | #

The first day of the proper QCon conference started out with Sir Tony Hoare doing a keynote about the difference and overlap between the science and engineering of computing. Fairly interesting, but the questions and answers were much more interesting stuff. One of the more interesting points made by Hoare was that in his view, a full specification is a generalization of testing. After the keynote I started out my track called Emerging Languages in the Enterprise. I introduced this track, doing 15 minutes of talking about my views on programming languages. The slides for my piece can be found here: http://olabini.com/presentations/ELITE.pdf. My talk was made much more interesting by Tony Hoare being in the front row. That made the whole thing a bit more daunting, obviously… =)

I then spent the rest of the day in my track – which was very good. I am very happy with all the presentations, and felt the track was a great success. First of was Michael Foord, talking about IronPython, and how Resolver uses IronPython to create a great product. Some interesting lessons and information there.

After lunch Jonas Bonér talked about Real-world Scala. The presentation gave a good grounding in Scala without looking at all small details – instead Jonas talked about more high level concerns and styles.

After that, Rich Hickey did a great presentation about Clojure. Rich did a great presentation, talking about Clojure from the ground up. It was very well received.

Martin Fowler did a fantastic presentation on ThoughtWorks experience with Ruby. The room was packed for this.

The final presentation in my track was Attila Szegedi talking about JavaScript in the Enterprise. This was also a great presentation, and gave me some new insight into what you could achieve with Rhino.

All in all, the full track was excellent, and all the presentations achieved pretty much what I hoped from them. I learned a lot from all of them.

After the final session of my track, Martin Fowler and Zach Exley did the evening keynote, talking about how technology helped the Obama compaign. Very interesting stuff too. At the end of the day, a very good day at QCon.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: clojure, ironpython, javascript, presentations, qcon, qcon london, ruby, scala. | #

The first two days of QCon London were tutorials. I didn’t actually spend all my time there, since I had to get back to our office at some times too. On the Monday, I attended Jim Webbers tutorial called GET connected, which talked about different ways of using the web for distributing and separation functionality, where REST style SOA is part of it, but also other things like POX. It was a very information rich session, and in the end Jim had to skip several things that I would personally have been interested to find out more about, such as different ways to handle security, and so on. At the end of the day, it was a very good tutorial, but the material was really too much for one half day.

I spent the rest of the day in the office, reconnecting with lots of colleagues. Lovely.

Tuesday I spent running between several tutorials. The morning was mostly in the Advanced Ruby tutorial by Sam Aaron, which was overall very good content. I think I might have ruined it for Sam a bit by sitting there and being annoying. The only thing that could have improved the tutorial would have been some more advanced material in the pieces on functional programming – not that the material Sam was using was bad, it was just a bit more basic than the rest, which made it feel a bit uneven.

In the afternoon, I spent some time in Dan Norths tutorial on BDD. His material is riveting and very useful. In fact, it was so riveting it was hard to find a place to sit, so I ended up not staying the whole time. I then sat down for a while in Joe Armstrongs tutorial on Erlang. Also good stuff, but it was material I already knew. So at the end of the day I went back to Sam Aarons talk on Ruby Aesthetics, which ended up sparkling several really interesting discussions.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: presentations, qcon, qcon london, tutorials. | #

In one and a half week, QCon London is coming up. That will be a week of great fun, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who has the possibility to be there. I have the highest respect for Trifork and InfoQ who are organizing the QCon conferences, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

This year I am actually not speaking at the conference itself. Instead I’m hosting a track where other people speak. My track is called “Emerging Languages in the Enterprise” and I’ve managed to convince some amazing people to show up and talk there. To be specific, my speakers are: Jonas Boner, Michael Foord, Attila Szegedi, Rich Hickey and Martin Fowler. So, if you are interested in languages, be there; it will be a blast.

ThoughtWorks UK have a tradition to organize geek nights around QCon, and this time is no exception. On the evening March 10th (that is a Tuesday) I will be talking about how to create a JVM language. I will use Ioke for most examples, but will also contrast with details from JRuby. The presentation will be quite audience controlled, so exactly what will be presented is not determined. But it should give people a good grounding in Ioke, at least. More information here. Hope to see you there!

2 Comments | By Ola Bini | In: ioke | tags: geek night, ioke, presentations, qcon. | #

So, I literally just got back from San Francisco, having attended QCon there. As always, it turned out to be a great event, with fantastic people and a very interesting presentations on the schedule. As it turns out, me and Nick’s tutorial was on the afternoon of the Monday, so after that everything could just get better. … In fact, the tutorial ended up working very well. I was happy to have Nick there, so I didn’t have to do all the talking myself. And Nick is much better at Rails than me anyway. So it was definitely a success.

The morning before out tutorial I spent in the Erlang tutorial, which was fun. Francesco is a very good teacher, and we got through lots of material.

Having finished my stuff the first day, I spent the rest of the week cruising around, relaxing and hanging out with nice people. The Tuesday I ended up in Martin’s, Neal’s and Rebecca’s tutorial on DSLs. I’ve been in this tutorial several times, but it just keeps getting better. Especially Rebecca’s pieces on parsing turned out to be very well polished this time. And of course, they are all great presenters.

The Wednesday keynote with Martin and Rebecca was about architecture, and how agile can help architecture groups with their problems as well as help bridge the gap between developers and architects, that often exist in larger organizations. Very well done.

The rest of the Wednesday I sat in the “Ruby in the Enterprise” track. I found out that Merb 1.0 runs very well on JRuby. Jason Seifer pronounced JRuby the winner among all the existing Ruby implementations, which was nice.

And then I had to run away and do an impromptu JRuby presentation at the nearby Girls In Tech Developer Forum.

At the end of the day, I saw Dean Wampler mix up all the free floating ideas about polyglot programming, and talk about it in something that approached a cohesive whole (which I’ve never been able to do). A well done presentation.

I can’t say I got too much out of Kent’s evening keynote, though. I ended up going out for a quiet dinner instead.

The Thursday began Tim Bray talking about the future of storage mediums. This presentation was too far away from my interests to produce anything stronger than a “meh…”.

After that I have a large gap in the schedule – I was supposed to see some presentations, but ended up hacking on a new language grammar with Kresten instead. Great fun of course.

After lunch I sat in on Brian’s talk on concurrency with the fork-join framework. This one I think I’d already seen, so I ended up working on Ioke during it.

Dennis Byrne gave a very cool talk on DSLs in Erlang. There is some stuff you can do that’s totally unbelievable. Best talk of the day. Possibly of the week.

After Dennis talk I’m not sure what I did actually. No memory. Oh, that’s right, I looked at the JUG panel and then went to the speakers dinner. The JUG panel was among others Rod Johnson, Bob Lee and one of the Seam guys. There were some mention of Rails in a way that meant the persons mentioning it hadn’t actually used it. There was also some static typing bias (especially from Bob who said that static typing was objectively better than dynamic typing).

During the Friday I spent some time in the functional language track (and saw a very nice talk about using Haskell to work with music), and I also saw Eric Evans give a very good talk about Strategic Design.

And that was QCon San Francisco. A very good conference, as usual.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conferences, qcon, qcon san francisco. | #