It has been an interesting day. I talked my boss into letting me use my annual ‘tuition’ reimbursement to attend the Pacific Northwest Software Symposium put on my No Fluff Just Stuff in Redmond. The conference is different in that they cover hard core topics with no marketing spin. They do not have an expo hall, just breakout room with speakers that know their stuff.
I arrived at the Redmond Town Center Marriott at noon and checked in. Some of my coworkers, developers for whom this was training, were already there and we talked for a bit. The event started at 1300 with a short introduction session and then it was off to my first breakout session.
I spent the majority of the day in one room listening to one guy speak. Jeff Brown is the VP of Professional Services at G2One and a member of the core Groovy and Grails development teams. The first session was an introduction to Groovy, a dynamic language that runs inside the Java Virtual Machine. I learned a few interesting things, but Groovy is similar in a lot of ways to Ruby so it wasn’t too much of a stretch.
The second session with Jeff was about Grails. Grails is a Java web framework built on top of Groovy. While the end result is a WAR file, you do not have all the nasty configuration files to wire together all the parts of your application. Grails includes Hibernate, Spring, log4j and other technologies but takes the heavy lifting away allowing the programmer to get to the core of the data domain and business logic.
Third was a session on advanced Grails where Jeff covered relationships, templates (what Rails calls ‘partials’), custom tag libraries (worth the price of admission right there!), AJAX and more. This session was largely a live coding exercise and we walked through most anything that someone could come up with. While this was going on I created a basic Grails app myself and mucked around a bit.
Jeff was a really good speaker and was focused on getting the most content across that he could. I enjoyed his sessions and learned a far bit.
Then came dinner with great cheese bread and a terrific chocolate cake. I ate more of that than I should have.
After dinner we heard a keynote from one of the presenters, Jared Richardson. Jared, the co-author of a great book called Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects, spoke about what he called "Career 2.0". The focus of this keynote was that you need to treat your knowledge as you would any other investment. No one else is going to invest in you like you will. Diversify your investments so that you are more insulated from the whims of the job market. Acknowledge it will take effort, set goals and plan accordingly.
Also he talked at length about sharing the things that you know. He pushed hard on blogging; blog about every problem you solve, every mistake you make and correct, every thing you research. If you write lots you get better at writing and you make a name for yourself. I liked the concept of getting beyond resumes to name recognition.
Anyway, I really enjoyed today and am looking forward to tomorrow. More to come…
Tags: career planning, confrence, education, grails, groovy, java, nfjs
