Tag Archives: Groovy

Fun at Netflix … join us!

My team is still looking for some great developers who feel passionate about working with other teams, improving resiliency in the cloud, and building out a continuous delivery platform. You may have heard of the Chaos Monkey — we have many more ideas where that one came from!

If you have a solid Java background, we definitely want to talk to you. Lots of JVM language excitement on the team: Groovy, Scala and yes, some Java too. Our jobs site is at jobs.netflix.com.

This is an amazing time to be at Netflix. I hope you’ll consider reaching out and talking to me about our team. I’ll be at SpringOne2GX in a few weeks (9/9-9/12), in Santa Clara. We’re also hosting a Scala meetup at Netflix on 9/9.

You can find me on twitter at @dmarsh or on Linked In. Hope to talk to you soon!

Alternative Languages on the JVM at the Java Posse Roundup

The Java Posse Roundup conference continues to evolve to meet the interests of the attendees. This year, the first day was an optional day,  with groups coding on alternate languages on the JVM.  Groups formed to share their collective knowledge and interest surrounding several languages. I chose to attend the Scala Hacking session, as did 13 other people.  In other locations around town, there was a similarly sized JavaFX group, and a smaller Groovy/Grails group.  Later in the day, Fan was added.

In the Scala session, we went through some code that we had developed for an evening session last year, implementing some functionality of LINQ (Language Integrated Query for .NET), in Scala.  We based our work on Bill Wagner's article from Visual Studio Magazine.  We didn't make much new progress, mainly because we were trying to dissect what we had dome both for our benefit as well as for those who had never seen the language.  We're hoping to get back to that later in the week.  You can read Joel Neely's blog that summarizes a lot of what we did along with some insight.

Later in the day at the Scala Dojo, Dick Wall demonstrated some of the work he's been doing with genomics, while another group moved over to another house, to work on ScalaTest with Bill Venners.  We spent some time getting our development environments set up, and started with some assignments.  Bill's talking about a release later this week, and is looking for help on the project.  Several people have expressed interest and working together was a good start.  I suspect that wasn't the last Scalatest hacking session either!

After a short break for dinner, we all got back together at the Posse House (as we affectionately call the house where the Java Posse stays during the conference) for a review of how we had all spent our day.  The Groovy/Grails team demonstrated their work on getting a simple CRUD app to work, and the JavaFX team demonstrated an application that they had built, which included a timer that counted down.  By adding some designer work in PhotoShop, they were able to get a styled app up and running, and even included sound.  It was an impressive demo. Joel Neely reviewed what our team had dome with Scala, and Fred Simon (who endured 48 hrs of travel and delays to get here) did a brief overview of Fan, which is a language that targets both the JVM and CLR.

We're all looking forward to the conference starting today, with open spaces sessions.  This year, we have exceeded the capacity of the Posse House for lightning talks (but not for gatherings), so the consensus is that the evening lightning talks will likely be held at the conference location as well.  It's not as cozy, but it will likely be more functional!  I'm sure that at some point today, people will head off to ski, and that's part of the experience as well.

So, off for another day in beautiful Crested Butte. First stop, Camp4Coffee.  Then, conference kickoff!

Detroit Java User Group is ALIVE!

After a long while of on-again/off-again meetings, I was pleased to hear the news that the Detroit Java User Group has reformed! This is great news for the east-siders who find Ann Arbor a bit too far to go for an evening meeting about Java. The Detroit group has a new home: ePrize headquarters in Pleasant Ridge (I-696 and Woodward area, near the Detroit Zoo).

The next 2 meetings have been scheduled.  More information yet to come, but here are the topics, so that you can set the time aside to go.  They look great to me, and I'm hoping to attend.

Wednesday October 22nd, Jim Steinberger – DOJO and DWR
Wednesday November 19th, Kirsten Schwark – Groovy

To be complete, I should add that the Ann Arbor Java User group topic has been announced for October as well.  On October 28, Matt VanVleet from Pillar Technology will discuss Automated testing using Pillar's tool: Verde.  

And many thanks to Kirsten for her summary of my Scala talk at the Ann Arbor Java User Group on September 23 (and for the "geek celebrity" title!).

 

 

Java Posse Roundup Day 1

The conference officially begins!

 

The Java Posse Roundup officially started today.  About 25-30 people have gathered here in Crested Butte, Colorado.  Bruce Eckel and the Java Posse together organized this open spaces event, and I’m really enjoying myself so far.   I won’t try to transcribe the sessions here, since the Java Posse will be putting them out in podcast format, assuming the audio is all fine.  It’s a great experiment, and I hope that it comes out great.  

 

The day started out at the event location, with Bruce describing the structure of Open Spaces.  I’ve blogged about that before, and I’m a total convert.  The ability to be able to put up ideas for discussion while at the event, thereby shaping your own experience, has totally ruined me for the eyes-forward (eyelids dropping) conferences.  

 

It always seems a bit strange to newcomers, but those of us who have done this before eagerly rushed over to the board to grab post-it notes and write down ideas for discussions.  We egged on the others, and soon the boards for all 4 days were pretty full, with 4 concurrent sessions. 

 

The first session of the day offered many choices, all difficult to choose from.  I went to a talk on Dynamic Languages on the JVM.  It started out with a discussion about dynamic languages, but quickly headed toward Domain Specific Languages (easy to build with dynamic languages).  At one point, we realized we had diverged, but everyone voted to keep going.  We had a great 1 hour talk that included mention of Jython, Groovy, Spring, Scala, CLOS, LISP, Ruby, tuples in Java, Domain Driven Design, performance of exceptions, and many many more topics. 

 

And, as always a huge number of book references came out of the discussion.  Some were technical, others fun but also offering some perspective to technical things.  I’ll list them here, just for fun (and so that I have a place to look when I want to read a new book):

 

Poignant Guide to Ruby (online book)

Innovation Games (by Luke Hohmann)

The Design of Everyday Things (by Donald A. Norman)

 

That was it for the first part of the first day.  We all headed off to ski, and planned to meet up later at Bruce’s house for a BBQ.  While most people downhill ski at these events, I had a hard time ignoring the Nordic trails, so off I went with another attendee and we skied the “Town Loop” (a free, flat loop in town).  It was great, just what I needed while I was adjusting to the altitude.

 

And yes, after skiing, everyone headed over to Bruce’s, where geek talk went on well into the night.  I finally left around 9:30 pm or so … it had been a long day.