from my work as a developer
Posts tagged devoxx
shared experience
Nov 21st
The 10th annual Devoxx conference is over and I was there, honey & win drank [1] 
It was my second time when I’ve participated in the Devoxx conference and it was the second time like almost all of us from SoftwareMill were joining the conference together. What can I say, it was worth to be there, to meet people from around the world and to have fun for all of the three days (in fact, four days ).
Maybe I wasn’t so happy to see so many Android related talks, but there were few talks that I enjoyed.
First was about how to become an awesome developer by Diabolical Developer aka Martijn Verburg and this talk filled out the gap in my thinking about how to be a great developer and how to follow all those shiny stars like Uncle Bob and others. I cannot say that everything is clear and perfect, but at last I’m not alone with my thoughts – there are other. If you’ll have opportunity to join that talk, I real encourage you to do that.
The second talks was given by Matt Raible about his Play Framework learning experience. It was very funny and educational as well. As always, Matt was very well prepared to give his talk and I real enjoyed it. He inspired me how can I learn Scala. So the plan is to learn Scala with Play Framework.
Another great thing was the OSS dinner with friends from the Apache Struts community – Rene, Rainer and Philipe and few others. Nice to met people you know just from the Internet, to talk face to face and to drink few beers (especially belgian’s beers ). It was awesome, really enjoyed that moment, hope we can meet next year as well.
Right now, after catching up mails, todos, I’m back at work with few ideas to implement. And in context of the conference and sharing experience I’m recommend you to see that TED’s presentation – share your experience 
metrics and worm holes
Jan 12th
It took me more time than I’ve expected to start the New Year on my blog. So here it is, the first post for the New Year! Happy New Year!
The last year I was at Devoxx 2010 conference and attended to Neal Ford‘s presentation about Implementing Emergent Design. This talk based on his post on the IBM’s DeveloperWorks web site about Evolutionary architecture and emergent design: Harvesting idiomatic patterns and the whole series.
The talk was about ckjm metrics and cyclomatic complexity – quite interesting tools to discover potential bugs and hard-to-maintain code in a project. What was the most important for me, Neal used the Apace Struts 2 project as an example, especially the UIBean class – you can find the details in the mentioned article. He presented how to prepare these metrics, how to read them and what they mean. A really interesting talk.
After all, I’ve asked Neal to give me more details about the problem and few days later I received an e-mail from him. I’ve followed his advice and inspired by his talk I’ve gave a promise to my self that I must improve that badly-looking code.
…. but wait, it’s just a badly-looking code. It had taken me another few weeks to discover it isn’t so important to improve that piece of code, it really doesn’t matter right now. There are plenty of places to improve code base of the Apache Struts 2 project and so many users don’t care about that – UIBean doesn’t exist for them.
The current UIBean implementation do the job, it isn’t pretty or easy to maintain, but right now there is no one for whom it is important. No one complains about it. Some day I’ll refactor the code of UIBean class but today isn’t that day.
The conclusion is the same as for code optimization, you shouldn’t optimize too early, so you shouldn’t improve too early. Don’t throw everything and try to improve some not-important part of your project. Don’t trust metrics by heart, they can lie to you, try to figure out what they mean in context of your knowledge of the project. They aren’t a silver bullet.
Today’s day brings to me another newsletter from TED web site and gave me answer to important question: the shortest connection between two points is …
more than expected
Nov 24th
The last few days / weeks were very buys for me and it wasn’t related to work
First I was presenting at JavaCamp #5 topic about self-development. You can find the slides and video here (sorry folks – only in Polish ). Besides me there were other lectures and they were presenting quite interesting topics
- Git by Konrad Malawski – how to use Git on daily basis
- Project Lombok – Cause We Hate Boilerplate! by Łukasz Żmudziński – no more getters/setters (but doesn’t work with IntelliJ IDEA
) - Testy jednostkowe i integracyjne w przykładach by Łukasz Czerpak – tests, tests and integration tests
In mean time pizza had arrived so there was time to discuss and socialize, what else I can say – very nice Saturday and looking for the next JavaCamp.
After that I was working hard on my project, maybe soon I’ll share more details. What can I say now is that I’m using the latest fancy stuff from Java EE world: JSF 2, CDI, EJB 3.1, JPA 2 (ok JSF 2 isn’t the coolest thing ).
Then the long weekend arrived – Independence Day – so I spent that time with my family at my parents-in-law. The most excited thing happend during returning – my wife hunted board by car
And came the Day – first time I’ve been participating in Devoxx conference. The journey had started at 10.00 AM from my home town and finished around 11.30 PM in All Seasons Hotel in Antwerpen – quite long as for 21st Century The whole SoftwareMill team were there with me!
The next three days were full of expected and unexpected experiences. Opening keynote was very cool – a bit too many people but Mark Reinhold was presenting very interesting topics about future of Java language. You know all that fancy tools like Lambda expressions, Closures, etc. Java 7 should be brilliant but Java 8 will be astonish
Lectures and presentations had very different levels of funny, essentiality and meeting expectations – from my point of view the same statement I can post about Javarsovia conference. So we don’t have to shame!
Anyway, presentation aren’t the main part of any conference. Also very important are people and discussions. During Devoxx I had plenty of both. I met other members of JetBrains Development Academy – we had very nice evening with dinner and few beers Thanks to Robert Dammer and other JetBrains guys and Ann
Next day I had pleasure to meet and talk to two Apache Struts committers – Rene Gielen and Rainer Hermanns. I missed the Open Source dinner, but I didn’t know about it early Next time. I also had chance talk to Matt Raible and Neal Ford – just few words but always…. There were also many guys and one girl from Poland – it was a great pleasure to meet you guys and drink some beers
After third day we had to come back, tired but with many new ideas and colleagues. What to say more – I’m very pleased that I was there and met all of you!
Cya next year!
PS. Few photos
