Just under a week later, here are my thoughts on NFJS days 2 and 3:
Day 2
1. JRuby (Stuart Halloway Justin Gehtland)
If you have had some experience writing Ruby/Rails applications, the first half of this seminar was mostly useless as it was more of an intro to the Ruby language syntax and idioms. That said, it was clear that the majority of the audience did not have much experience with Ruby as there were quite a few syntactical (hawesome word by the way) questions being asked by audience members. The second half of the seminar proved to be much more interesting though as Justin dug more into the Java side of JRuby and showed some examples that lead me to believe that these two languages are breeding one promising little infant.
2. Groovy For Java Programmers (Jeff Brown)
Although Groovy might be the worst name for a language I have ever heard of (no wait, Pizza is…), Jeff did a great job of selling it to me. This is more than likely my “learn one new language a year” language for next year. This seminar almost forced me to start a petition that every NFJS attendee must pass an “Intro to Dynamic-Languages” quiz before they are allowed to ask any questions during seminars so the rest of us can actually get some useful information from the speakers instead of listening to them explain dynamic-typing (for the 10th time) to the 3 dudes in the room that have never written a PHP/Perl/Ruby application. Your teachers lied to you, there is such thing as a dumb question.
3. ???
I honestly can’t remember what seminar I went to. It was probably good though. My mind was on beer.
4. ???
Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeer.
Day 3
I went to some seminars. I learned some stuff. I won an iPod Nano. But my mind was on the Green and Gold. 5 and 1. Whooda thunk?
Overall impressions of NFJS 2007
I absorbed a lot more information this year than in Boston last year and am nothing short of amazed at how well the presenters know their content. NFJS is an awesome conference and they know how to put on a wicked breakfast/lunch. Looking forward to next year.
