The main thing I took away

What I primarily got out off the roundup was Scala and JavaFX. Although the roundup in general is a lot about our profession, the stuff outside the sessions focused more on the fun bits, ie. programming. I have heard about Scala before, especially since it’s basically mentioned in every JavaPosse podcast. I have also looked at some Scala code. But during the Roundup I got to see a lot more code, and learn more about the language. I even went online to Amazon during the roundup to order my own copy off the Scala book, only to later hear that Bill Venners brought some for us all to buy. I guess I should have checked with him. I’ll probably post more about Scala as I learn more.

JavaFX I also found interesting. This is also something I have played a bit with on my own. It’s really interesting to look at a language that is designed with a specific use-case in mind, rather than being more general like the languages  I usually use. The bind stuff is awesome, and having keywords such as tween and duration literals seems really nice. In a normal language these would be too special case to have as language constructs. But in a language dealing with animation they fit right in.

The sessions

There where quite a few good sessions to attend to. I really enjoyed the one on Developer Communication, and I hope it gets out soon so I can share it with others at work, and management. The session on Code Generation was also interesting. I am basically opposed to it. But the session started off mostly looking at cases where code generation is useful. And it’s mostly in adaptor patterns. I think the ideal here is that the generator just creates an interface that is used together with a framework in your application. Then the framework deals with translating calls to the interface to the underlying architecture, say web services.

Another good session was on dynamic vs static languages. Since Python is the language I work in now, I was hoping to come to some defence off the dynamic languages at least. Typically in a room off static language users, the bias is towards static languages. I am sure the reverse would be true at a python conference. I do see a tendency though for newer static languages to borrow useful principles from dynamic languages. Here again Scala and JavaFX are good examples of how static languages don’t need to be overly verbose. I also think dynamic languages sometimes benefit from stealing from static languages. Pythons module system and strong typing is examples off this.

All in all, the conference was great. There are proabably stuff I missed here, but they will all appear as the podcasts off the sessions get out. I am really hopefull that I can attend the roundup again next year.

The trip over was rather long. It took me about 28 hours from getting out of bed until arriving at the Lupine house in Crested Butte. Worst part was not being able to sleep on the trip across the Atlantic, which took nearly 9 hours. And it was also frustrating to be really tired yet not getting to sleep properly through the night. The jet lag is still bad, but improving.

The first day was the alternative languages day, which I attended a session on Scala. There was a lot to take in, as it did not really start at the most basic level, but instead dived right into how to doing LINQ in Scala. It was pretty interesting still, as there where a lot of questions and I learned about the more advanced features of Scala. We also looked at Bill Venners scalatest code, and it looked like a nice concept for expressing tests. Dick Wall showed us some code from Navagenics which was useful for looking at more basic Scala code.

I went over to the chestnut house next to see if I help on anything on Bill Venners scalatest project, but I spent the entire time trying to get it to compile with the fast scala compiler, which for some reason doesn´t work properly on my computer. And the project doesn´t compile on the normal scala compiler either, due to high memory demands. So that was a bit off a miss. I should have brought my Linux laptop instead, because I really don´t feel home enough with the Mac for development.

Day 2 I attended a session on Developer Productivity and Technical Dept. The Developer Productivity explored many facets off what makes a developer productive, as well as how you measure productivity. It´s not really an easy problem to solve other than through peer review, as there generally are no good metrics to use. And any metric you implement is bound to get gamed by the developers anyways, to the detriment off the project.

Next we had the Technical Dept session, which was also really interesting. Here we also got into how you would measure it and how it relates to monetary debt. Technical debt we defined as code or architecture that limited and slowed down developer productivity. Each time the suboptimal code had to be touched or used, you pay interest on it through increased time use. However, you don´t always need to pay off you technical debt like normal debt. If the code is seldom used or changed, it just sits there and work, it´s not necessarily that efficient to fix the problems.

After this a bunch of us went out cross country skiing, which for my part involved a lot of falling down. I haven´t really done cross country before, but have done some downhill recently. But the principles I have learned from downhill really didn´t really translate to going down hills on cross country skis.

In the evening we went out for some great Thai food before attending the lightning talks. There was a bunch of interesting ones here as well, touching on a variety of topics, including Relativity Theory vs Quantum Theory and how we suck at seeing the color Blue.

After the lightning talks, Jet lag started to hit again, so I ended up back at the Lupine house and went to bed around 2300.

I am really exited about this trip, but right now I am not looking forward to getting up at 4 in the morning, and travel for over 24 hours to get to Crested Butte. I have my laptop, lots of games and fun for my PSP, some podcasts and music on my iPod, and a book to read on my way. And of course I have my laptop with development tools should I get the urge to program.