Strange Loop 2009 – Day 2

Welzie — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:09:53 +0000

My notes and thoughts about day two of strange loop 2009.

Also be sure to check out my Day one notes.

jQuery – Matt Taylor

http://weblog.dangertree.net/
Showed numerous examples how easy jQuery makes it to select and edit HTML elements. Made me realize I should use jQuery even in small apps.
Also showed examples of the jQuery AJAX functionality

Mobile Development 101

http://www.slideshare.net/michael.galpin
http://fupeg.blogspot.com/
This session was full which doesn’t surprise me since mobile development is about to get easier thanks to Android.
Started off going how to develop apps for the iPhone
- The emulator and development software only run on a Mac
- Has to be written in Objective C
  - I wanted to throw up when I saw the objective c examples
  - No garbage collection. Memory is limited on phones so this is an important issue.
  - Maybe I’m just to much of a simpleton, but I really don’t ever want to write any objective C
- MVC framework – cocoa touch
- No background processing on iphone
Android
- Can run any language that is built on the JVM
- XML format for UI develoment
- Does not use standard MVC pattern. Uses something called Activities and Intents.
- There are multiple android emulators
Mobile dev best practices (not specific to android or iphone)
- Need lean web services
- Limit network traffic
- Limit audio/video/images
Mobile Web Application
- Alternative to writing an iPhone/Android app
- A lot of phones have the same browser now
- Some mobile browsers leak memory

Entrepreneur Talk – Panel Discussion

This book was mentioned, Outliers: The Story of Success
Someone said that you need irrational arrogance to start your own company.
Another person said that start ups are all offense and no defense. Just keep putting stuff out, early and often
The idea was presented that everyone has risk even the person working for a company because you can be fired at any time
The current work culture is sort of like having one client at a time because developers change jobs so often.

Polyglot Grails – Jeff Brown

http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/speaker/jeff_brown
http://javajeff.blogspot.com/
You can use many languages with Grails. Jeff even gave an example of Grails with a simple language he created
methodMissing(string name, args) is a very interesting feature of Groovy

Minimalism – Alex Payne

http://twitter.com/Al3X
http://al3x.net/books_talks.html
Interesting talk about little m minimalism and how it be applied to code
Alex made a few comments about how programming is a young field

List of slides on strangeloop.com
Day two sessions

Strange Loop 2009 – Day 1

Welzie — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:27:56 +0000

A new developer conference has started in St Louis this year named Strange Loop. Normally I don’t go to developer conferences because they are either in a different country or on the coasts. This one was close by in St Louis, MO. And from the quality of speakers and diverse sessions I predict next years conference will sell out very quickly unless they increase the capacity. Below are my overall topics/themes I took away from the conference and some interesting points from each talk I witnessed along with links to the speaker’s site and slide show if available.

Day two

Strange Loop Thoughts Overall

open source, open source, open source

every talk envolved open source. The FUD around open source is finally withering away.

DRY constant theme
Mobile development is upon us and will be for maybe ever
Scala, Clojure, Groovy are HOT languages on the JVM
Great conference that covered many relevant topics
All the talks were technical, no boring management oriented sales pitches

Functional Ruby – Dean Wampler

http://deanwampler.com/
Link to slide show
I atteneded this talk because I’m interested in the functional programming line of thought. And I don’t get to see much ruby code.
Recommends learning a functiona programming language: Scala, Hascal, Cojure

Multiprocessor systems are making it more important to use threads. Threads and synchronizaton is hard to get right. So functional languages that have immutable objects/values are easier because immutable objects/values don’t require synchronization.

Try to avoid a bloated domain objects that have numerous properties to fullfill multiple requirements for different use cases. Have smaller objects for seperate uses.

Polyglot Programming – Dean Wampler

Link to slide show
polyglot programming: using more than one programming language. Not like using CSS, JS. But like using Groovy and Java or Groovy and Clojure.
Dean thinks that Scala could become very popular in the future

Hybrid object and functional language
Multiple cpus is driving the need for functional languages

Mentioned the famous quote: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exuper

Griffon (Swing just got fun again) – James Williams

http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/index
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Griffon
Mentioned that the swring application framework is dead
Griffon is the unofficial grails for the desktop

It really did looks rails like from the project layout to the build process

Suggested Groovy In Action for anyone that wanted to earn Groovy

Future of Java – Bob Lee

http://crazybob.org
Writes his talks in Java. I’m serious. Here is the SVN repo for his talks
- http://crazybobs-talks.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
Talked about how/why he wanted better resource management in Java.
Said he searched the JDK and found that 74 out of 110 the JDK has leaks for a certain IO functionality.
Talked about his work on JSR-330 dependency injection in JDK
- @Inject annotation
New quicksort that was developed for Android JVM (Harmony)

Day two

Day One Sessions

Code Hangover » polyglot