I should really have blogged this earlier, but the last few weeks have been hectic. Anyway, better late then never, eh?
Tonight – that is Wednesday, March 24th – ThoughtWorks Pune will host a geek night where I will talk about JRuby. I will talk a bit about what’s coming in the upcoming 1.5 release, and other fun things happening in JRuby land.
If you’d like to come, you can find more information and registration here.
I will speak at ÜberConf in Denver in June. Should be lots of fun! I will talk about JRuby and building languages. I might also possibly cover Ioke – we’ll see what happens.
I am part of a team at ThoughtWorks helping out organizing the very first RubyConf in India. I’m very excited about this. So if you have the possibility to come to Bangalore, the event will be March 20 and 21.
We already have some solid speakers lined up. Chad Fowler will keynote, and so will I, and we have a number of other people coming in. A few of my colleagues from ThoughtWorks, such as Sarah Taraporewalla, Sidu Ponnappa and Aman King. Other speakers include Hemant Kumar, Pradeep Elankumaran, Arun Gupta and others. Finally, Nick Sieger will also come to Bangalore for this event!
So as you can see, this is gearing up to be a great event! Hope to see you there.
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.
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!
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:
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.
This idea came to me as a tweet, but was way too long for a tweet. As it turns out, it’s also something I’ve been saying a lot lately, since it’s the answer to one of the very common arguments against dynamic languages.
The argument usually goes like this: “Dynamically typed languages are fine for smaller programs and simple web applications, but if you’re building something big, something that will be several millions of lines of code, you really need all the tools you can only get from a statically typed language”. Where the statically typed language mentioned is typically Java. The argument is still common enough without any specific language name mentioned though.
Interestingly, there are several problems and fallacies in this seemingly simple argument. I’m not going to tackle all of them here, but just focus on the beginning. Namely the idea that you are building something big. First of all, how do you know that? Have you done anything like it before? And how do you know it would be big in a different language? How do you know you can’t decouple the application in such a way you won’t have to build anything big? There are so many assumptions that can be questioned here. But at the end of the day, my glib answer that summarizes this usually goes something like this:
“Optimizing for your software project becoming big is the same as optimizing a car to hit a rock wall – you are optimizing for failure”
I firmly believe that becoming big is really failure. Once you have a big enough project you have lost. It might still work, but the cost will be extreme, and maintaining it will be a large burden too.
This is the reason I like agile. It emphasizes small, working pieces all the time. If you work with code this way, you can’t really become big. Instead, your project will be forced to be modularized and divided into smaller, more logical components that are highly cohesive and decoupled from each other.
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.
I spent this Friday and Saturday in London at the RubyFoo conference, organized by Trifork. RubyFoo is a small pre-conference to the larger JAOO conference. As you might expect, it’s focused on Ruby, and it’s quite small. On the friday we were about 50 people, and on Saturday about 40. The small amount of people and the fact that all presentations were in the same track made it much easier to network and communicate with people. I liked the focus this gave to the conference, and it was also an excellent opportunity to meet new people and get new ideas.
On the Friday there were five presentations, and on the Saturday it was an open spaces. The five presentations were all focused around the area of communicative programming. I talked about JRuby and did several demonstrations of how JRuby can be used to call out to different languages. My examples included talking to Clojure, Erlang and Haskell.
After me, Aslak Hellesøy talked about Cucumber and how Cucumber supports lots of different programming languages. Very cool. Aslak always give good presentations.
We then had lunch, and then Sam Aaron gave an interesting talk about communicative programming, and the essence of what we are doing. Very cerebral, definitely something that sparked lots of thoughts in peoples minds.
Adam Wiggins gave a talk about Heruko. I haven’t actually tried Heruko yet, but it looks very cool.
Finally, Matz gave a talk about the different styles of programming in Ruby, tied in with his history of creating Ruby and what the inspirations were. Very nice.
On the Saturday my colleague Dan North facilitated the open spaces discussions. I gave a 30 minute talk about Ioke – people seemed to enjoy it. After that Dan North, me, Aslak and a few others had a discussion about static versus dynamic typing.
After lunch I held a discussion about Ruby 1.9, getting some ideas why people weren’t using it, and what problems the people using it had encountered.
Finally, me, Aslak and Sam sat down to add Ioke support to Cucumber. This went really well – and I liked pairing with Aslak. Sadly I couldn’t stay until we were done, but Aslak and the others continued while I was heading out to the airport.
All in all, RubyFoo was a great conference, and I hope they can keep the same size the next time. 50 people were really a great size, and I liked the discussions we had.
September 29th, ThoughtWorks will hold a day of seminars and a tutorial in Stockholm, Sweden. The seminars are free. I will talk about alternative languages, Martin Fowler will talk about software design in the 21st century, and another ThoughtWorks speaker will talk about DSLs for functional testing.
The tutorial is a half day tutorial given by Martin Fowler and me. We will talk about domain specific languages.
If this sounds interesting, go in and find more information and register here. Hurry, though – places are limited!
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I am a software developer working for Centro de Autonomía Digital, mainly with privacy, security and cryptography issues. I have worked on many different things in my life, including programming language design and implementation, security, privacy and cryptography, artificial intelligence and more. |
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