plain old objects

I recently spent a couple of days in Oslo, Norway at the JavaZone conference. This was my second time at the conference and once again I was impressed: great presentations; an overflow room overlooking the exhibit floor where you can tune into any of the six tracks and watch talks on a large video screen; high-quality food available all day long; onsite child care; and all the talks are videoed and made available soon after the conference.

At JavaZone, I gave the latest version of my Polyglot persistence/NoSQL talk. In this version, I shortened the generic introduction to NoSQL and expanded the more interesting POJOs in Action case study. The case study describes the implementation of a use case from my book using Redis, Cassandra and MongoDB. You can view the video here.

There were quite a few presentations that I enjoyed:

• Neal Ford‘s awesome talk on presentation patterns and anti-patterns – this was the first talk of the conference and made me want to throw away my slides. If you create (powerpoint) presentations that you must watch this talk.
• Tim Berglund‘s two talks on Complexity theory and Software Development and the Cassandra NoSQL database. The content was great and both presentations were fine examples of how to apply presentation patterns.
• Daniel Spiewak gave two Scala-related talks.  The first talk Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures in Scala is about efficiently implementing  data-structures that don’t support destructive updates (example code). The second talk High Wizardry in the Land of Scala is about mind-blowing yet useful things that you can do with Scala such as higher-kinded types.
• Software G forces by Kent Beck, which describes how software development practices change as your release cycle gets shorter and shorter.

The friday after the conference I went on the Norway in Nutshell tour with @starbuxman. That turned out to be a very long tiring day, which was made even more so by hanging out in a  bar the night before until past midnight with @starbuxman, @m_f_, and @jtdavies. The day started with catching the 6.30am train in direction of Bergen and we got back to Oslo at 10.30pm. In between, we had two 5 hour train rides; another 1 hour train ride down the mountain; a two hour ferry ride through the Nærøyfjord and Aurlandsfjord fjords; and a death defying bus ride. But it was incredibly worthwhile. The scenery was spectacular.