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. | #

During Saturday I attended the Scala LiftOff conference. THere were about 50-60 people there this year – many interesting people. The format of the conference was to have everyone propose sessions to talk about, and then put them in different time slots. This worked out great in practice, except for the small detail that the place we were in had terrible acoustics. It was extremely hard to make out what people were saying at times.

The exceptions to the unconference format were Martin’s keynote talk, before we started, and also something they called speedgeeking. I’ll talk more about that later.

So, Martin Odersky talked about the next five years of Scala – this information is pretty well covered in Dean Wamplers blog entry about the BASE meeting. I am impressed by some of the things they’re planning for the future.

After that I decided to attend a session John Rose put together, about JSR 292, invoke dynamic, and other features we could add to the JVM to make life for Scala easier. This turned into a pretty interesting discussion about different things. Martin Odersky was there and gave his perspective on what kind of features would be most useful. He was specially interested in interface injection and tail-call optimization, but we managed to cover quite a lot of ground in this discussion.

During the next slot I ended up being a butterfly – no session was really extremely interesting.

We had lunch and during that I saw Alex Payne describe some of the things they are doing at Twitter using Scala. After that came the speedgeeking. The basic idea was that twelve people should do small demos, max five minutes. They would do those demos for a smaller group of people, and then switch group – until everyone had seen those demos. I didn’t like this concept at all, and the way it worked out was just annoying – I ended up talking to John Rose and Martin Odersky for most of the time.

After that, me, Josh and Amanda figured that the weather was very nice so we moved our sessions outside. This also solved the problem with the bad acoustics. The first one of the outside sessions was Martin convening people to talk about equality and hash code semantics. The way implicits work right now make for some very strange and unexpected cases – such that “bob”.reverse == “bob” is not true. There are also several intricacies in how to handle hash code calculation for mutable collections. We didn’t really come to any conclusions, but Martin was happy that he’d gone through the available options and thoughts pretty thouroughly.

After that Josh and Amanda led a discussion about what kind of patterns we’re starting to see in functional object-oriented hybrid languages. Amandas experience with F# came in handy when comparing to the approaches used in Scala. No real conclusions here either, but lots of interesting discussions. My one mental note was to look up a recent OBJ paper, detailing an Object calculus. This reference came from Paul Snively.

After that the conference was over – me, Josh and Amanda was joined by Paul Snively for a beer. That ended up with me ranting about programming languages, as usual…

All in all, Scala LiftOff was a great conference, with a collection of many interesting people from several language communities. This ended up sparking very interesting discussions.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: blogging | tags: conference, liftoff, san francisco, scala. | #

The title for this blog entry is actually dual in purpose. I will talk about the two last days of JavaOne, the Thursday and the Friday this week. But one of the big rumors from the news room this year was that it is likely that this JavaOne will be the last one ever. I can’t really comment on that, but this JavaOne did feel a bit less enthusiastic than it used to. Anyway. The last two days were less hectic than the first ones, so this entry won’t be very long.

My first session of the day was Neal Fords talk about design patterns in Groovy and JRuby. I’ve seen this talk before, and it is pretty good – Neal talks about how some of the classic Gang of Four patterns disappear in languages that support more advanced features. So Neal showed some of these. After that he went through some new patterns he has seen in dynamic languages, such as his Type Transmogrification pattern.

After that Tobias Ivarsson talked about how to explot concurrency in dynamic languages. I was a bit surprised to see Scala in this talk, but it did make sense. The content was very good, although Tobias ran out of material quite quickly. It was interesting to see how different the concurrency performance of JRuby and Jython was – but of course this is something the Jython guys easily can fix, once they’re done with the more pressing issue of getting 2.5 compatibility. In fact, they are making rapid progress on this, and this week saw a new release candidate released. Good stuff.

After that Charles and Tom did a talk about scripting Java with JRuby. This was a new version of the classic JRuby talk, and I think it worked really well. Most of the talk concentrated on a larger example instead of looking at small tidbits.

After that me and Charles spent a few hours in the ThoughtWorks Studios, taking a look at how the JIT compiler works with Mingle.

The first and only BOF for the evening was the JSR 292 Cookbook BOF. This session went into some more details on how it works, showed some code that uses MethodHandles and also had Charles talk about his experience with using invoke-dynamic in JRuby.

The Friday started with Gosling’s toy show. Sadly, I missed most of that. My first session was an introduction to the internals of IBM’s Java Virtual Machine. A very interesting presentation that looked at the kind of optimizations their VM does – including showing how the assembly generated will be different depending on how hot the code in question is.

After that Brian Goetz and two other HotSpot engineers talked about the kind of things HotSpot do to make Java code fast. Together, those two talks gave a pretty thorough understanding of how JVMs can be made fast.

This year at JavaOne was pretty good. Lots of fun stuff going on and many interesting sessions.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: conferences, javaone, san francisco. | #

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. | #

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. | #

So, next week and the week after that I’ll be in San Francisco. I’ll participate in the ThoughtWorks code jam on Tuesday and Wednesday, and do a tech talk at Google sometime by the end of the week.

If someone is interested in meeting up, talking about JRuby, Ruby or programming languages in general, just get in touch.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: san francisco. | #

As mentioned before I will be in San Francisco next week for QCon, and the week after that for Oracle OpenWorld. I will be part of a panel debate at QCon and man a booth on Oracle OpenWorld. In fact, if you’re attending OpenWorld you should visit ThoughtWorks booth at 343 Moscone South. Looking forward to seeing you there.

No Comments | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: openworld, qcon, san francisco. | #

It seems conference season is just coming up for me. I’ll actually not be presenting at any of these events – just attending, being marketing and so on. First of, I’ll run around at Grails eXchange in London next week as official ThoughtWorks representative. That is bound to be interesting.

I’ll also attend QCon in San Francisco from 5th to 9th November. Directly following that I’ll also be at Oracle’s OpenWorld event from 11th November to 15th November. I’ll have a fair amount of spare time in the evenings during the two weeks in San Francisco, so if anyone want to have a beer and discuss geeky things, feel free to mail me. Also, if anyone is interested in JRuby, I’m more or less always available to do talks on things like that.

Later on, I’ll also be at JavaPolis in Antwerp, Belgium, in December.

See you out there.

1 Comment | By Ola Bini | In: Uncategorized | tags: grails, javapolis, openworld, qcon, san francisco. | #