Summary of JAOO Sydney 2009

Attended JAOO Sydney 2009 last Thursday and Friday so here are my thoughts...


Note: I don't normally attend any ThoughtWorker sessions because hey... I can just talk to them directly.  Just assume those sessions were good. :)

Highlights: Avi Bryant, both talks.  One on understanding why it's possible and important to make Ruby faster and another, which was the best of the conference, about sharing the experience his team had designing a new product.  Beyond the talks, he just generally seems to be a cool guy (and a fellow Canadian!).  Meeting him in person actually exceeds his reputation which I was already aware of from Seaside and DabbleDB.  Myles, who is himself quite the impressive Ruby hacker, summed it up quite nicely:  "Wow... he's good".

Mike Cannon-Brookes' talk about all the interesting things they're trying at Atlassian.

Low points: Too many bullet points!  Gah!  Given that I bumped into Linda Rising there, I was reminded of how PLoP uses shepherding to prepare papers before the conference and it occurred to me that presentation shepherding might be something worth introducing.  Most of the speakers have very deep knowledge and experience.  It's unfortunate when poor presentation style undermines message delivery.

Funny points: Steve Hayes saying the he doesn't want me to attend any of his presentations since I was doing presentation critiques via Twitter.  Bullet points aren't "visual hooks"!

Fun points: Java Puzzler session with Joshua Bloch with a few puzzles that apparently were being presented for the first time.

Chatting with Linda Rising, Avi Bryant, and Steve Hayes about the peculiarities and origin of the Farenheit system for temperature and various other trivia.

Surreal points: Two people walking out of and red carding (i.e., score as dislike) Avi's second talk (aka the one I considered the best of conference).  I found it fascinating that this occurred because it suggests some kind of fundamental flaw in understanding about the work we do.  What was happening inside their heads?

Going to watch Star Trek at the nearby IMAX, bumping into Douglas Crockford, and inviting him to join our group.

Other random interesting points: MEF appears to be something like OSGi but not quite (which may not be a bad thing).  Realised that a number of people didn't understand that Clemens Szyperski was not just talking about Dependency Injection and that wasn't the point.  (I blame presentation style)

Javascript safe subset projects: Caja and ADsafe

Flex demos are always very slick and I'm quite weary of dealing with cross-browser issues so I wonder...