NFJS
Last year, I attended NFJS, even paying my own way. I'm back again this year because it was such a good experience.
This year, my only disappointment so far is that I happened to catch a cold right before the conference began. I'm snuffly, sneezy, and tired. I missed the last session and the dinner yesterday, because I was too tired, and went home early. I'm missing the first session this morning as well.
It's especially disappointing because I like to spend time speaking with other attendees. But right now I feel like a plague carrier, so I'm trying to stay away from everyone as much as possible. Oh well, there's always next year.
Yesterday, I attended the first two talks by Brian Goetz - "Effective Concurrent Java" and "The Java Memory Model".
In "Effective Concurrent Java", the first suggestion was to document thread safety in your code, perhaps using annotations. I think that wouldn't fly where I work... Later, Brian delved into things that I might be able to use, like making more objects immutable, where possible. This was a good talk, with lots of food for thought.
The same applies for "The Java Memory Model" talk, which revolved around how multithreading can result in weird, scary stuff happening at runtime. This is another talk where I'll have to run through his slides a few more times to really absorb it. There's one problem with this talk. When giving examples, only very simple code snippets are used. It's hard to imagine how or where you would come across these problems "in real life," especially if your current application is running smoothly right now.
While listening to these two talks, it occurred to me that Java applications can be run in many different contexts - within a container, as a standalone application, on machines with a single processor or multiprocessor systems, etc. Brian should put more emphasis on the context in which we need to worry about these problems. He did mention it in a few places, but I think it should be emphasized and discussed more. His later talk, "Are All Web Applications Broken?", might have gone into this more, but I missed that.
Brian is a good speaker, although he's not as dynamic or splashy as David Hussman or Ted Neward. His speaking style is similar to Paul Krugman (to be clear: style, not content!). His talks are more like academic lectures. Don't get me wrong; they are not boring! I think his topics are among the more hardcore ones at the conference, with lots of really useful information. I attended a couple of his talks last year, so I was expecting to get high quality, useful tech talks again. And that's what I got!
This year, my only disappointment so far is that I happened to catch a cold right before the conference began. I'm snuffly, sneezy, and tired. I missed the last session and the dinner yesterday, because I was too tired, and went home early. I'm missing the first session this morning as well.
It's especially disappointing because I like to spend time speaking with other attendees. But right now I feel like a plague carrier, so I'm trying to stay away from everyone as much as possible. Oh well, there's always next year.
Yesterday, I attended the first two talks by Brian Goetz - "Effective Concurrent Java" and "The Java Memory Model".
In "Effective Concurrent Java", the first suggestion was to document thread safety in your code, perhaps using annotations. I think that wouldn't fly where I work... Later, Brian delved into things that I might be able to use, like making more objects immutable, where possible. This was a good talk, with lots of food for thought.
The same applies for "The Java Memory Model" talk, which revolved around how multithreading can result in weird, scary stuff happening at runtime. This is another talk where I'll have to run through his slides a few more times to really absorb it. There's one problem with this talk. When giving examples, only very simple code snippets are used. It's hard to imagine how or where you would come across these problems "in real life," especially if your current application is running smoothly right now.
While listening to these two talks, it occurred to me that Java applications can be run in many different contexts - within a container, as a standalone application, on machines with a single processor or multiprocessor systems, etc. Brian should put more emphasis on the context in which we need to worry about these problems. He did mention it in a few places, but I think it should be emphasized and discussed more. His later talk, "Are All Web Applications Broken?", might have gone into this more, but I missed that.
Brian is a good speaker, although he's not as dynamic or splashy as David Hussman or Ted Neward. His speaking style is similar to Paul Krugman (to be clear: style, not content!). His talks are more like academic lectures. Don't get me wrong; they are not boring! I think his topics are among the more hardcore ones at the conference, with lots of really useful information. I attended a couple of his talks last year, so I was expecting to get high quality, useful tech talks again. And that's what I got!
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posted by md at 5:57 AM
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