My talk has been accepted at CodeMash. I'll be leading a discussion about Scala, which is combines functional and object-oriented programming and runs on the JVM. Yes, the JVM is the Java Virtual Machine, but much like the CLR (which is the .NET platform), the JVM supports many different languages. Scala is one of those languages (as is Groovy, Jython, JRuby, and many others).
I'll be previewing sections of my talk at our upcoming lightning talks.
It's not just Art Fair this week
Yes, it's Art Fair week. Townies know to avoid driving into Ann Arbor unless they're actually GOING to Art Fair. I have a meeting on Wednesday, so I'm riding my bike from the outskirts of town. Usually, our friends Melissa Dominiak and Micheal Cole come in to do Art Fair, but this year, they're skipping it, so I am too. They have an ultra cool gallery in Hannibal, MO now, a renovated church. We were there last October. The home of Mark Twain, it now has a thriving artist community. Who'd a thunk it?
Anyhow, other than Art Fair, there are still things to do! GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET User Group) has Julie Lerman coming in to talk about ADO.NET. Bill blogged about her visit, and it's on our calendar as well. And as Bill points out, if Lansing is closer, she's speaking at GLUGNet on Thursday as well.
And I discovered a new podcast, thanks to a member of the Java Posse Google Group (thanks Patrick Archibald!). The Software Engineering Radio Podcast is available on the SE Radio website and on iTunes. This week's podcast is an interview with Martin Odersky, creator of Scala. It's queued up and I'm looking forward to listening!
Still waiting on the Google web team to send us the link for the registration for the Google Tech Talk in Ann Arbor on August 2. Hang in there!
Hannibal Arts Council
Micheal and Melissa's gallery is listed here
Software Engineering Radio Podcasts
Bill's blog entry on Julie Lerman's talk
Julie's speaking this week at GANG and GLUGNet
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.