Jun
2012
JAZOON 2012 Day 1
Yesterday started JAZOON 2012. One thing that draw my attention while the moderator (Jutta Eckstein) spoke : 6% out of 400+ participants are from Romania, and so far I met 6 persons from Cluj :). There are 2 types of tracks MAIN(JAVA, .NET and other technologies) and SET (Software Engineering Today), in total 79 presentations : how do you mix what you love (technologies, etc) with what you are doing well on a daily basis on your job? I will try to summarize my experience so far.
Well the day started with the keynote of Dave Thomas, continued with Joerg Baechtiger ‘s and Fredrik Ekholdt’s presentations.
Dave Thomas rants about past and present technologies and methodologies like Java, NoSql, Agile etc, but also about the trends in the future software development, like functional programming and giving the tools to the end user to make his own app.
The idea behind Joerg Baechtiger’s presentation “How to fake the metrics – Or how valid are the metics?” : based on the metrics one creates a lot of decisions are taken, but reward, prevent punishment and control identified as the 3 root causes to fake metrics. So be careful when reading any metrics, to have all data involved.
Fredrik Ekholdt presented Play 2.0, a lightweight web framework, a combination between the ease of Rails and JVM. Examples were given for Java and Scala. Play 2.0 really looks nice. It does incremental compiling and compiles Javascript as well, but async in play does not look as awesome as it does in node.js.
After lunch there were 2 talks about Agile and do’s and dont’s about these methodologies.”Death by dogma vs assembling agile” , by Sander Hoogendoorn gave good advices about implementing and adapting the methodology to each team and project. Sometimes lightweight agile, user stories and simple planning are enough, but there are complex projects where more then these are needed: e.g. some documentation.
Jutta Eckstein’s presentation was about having agile development within a corporation and all the problems it raises, within other departments of the corporation, but there are not so many solutions.
Then was Eclipse Scout – great when having more GUI’s and one back-end to implement. And then Michael Pellaton complicated himself with annotation processors and java compilers due to @Configuration classes in Spring.
Then right before networking was the keynote about Watson from IBM, one of a kind system for analyzing and interpreting the natural language. It succeeded in winning the competition Jeopardy, against the 2 best of the game’s participants, and actually it won by accumulating the double sum of both participants’ points. The next step for this will be implementing it as a helper in the healthcare system in the USA – knowing every paper published in this domain. You should check it on youtube, it’s pretty impressive. 🙂
There are 2 more great days. I’ll try to keep you posted.