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Sally, please send me more photos from the wedding the other weekend. Preferably not so many with my mug in them. Do you have any of Navy Boi Kyle in “suit-mode”? Or any other of interest?

Thanks ahead of time.

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.

As a few of you know, two of my co-workers and I are attending the NFJS (No Fluff Just Stuff) Software Symposium this weekend. Here’s my take on day 1:

1. Building DSLs in Static and Dynamic Languages (Neal Ford)
– DSLs seem to be one of those things that most people see the advantage of but 99% of them never get to the point of actually implementing. Neal’s main example of a DSL in a real world situation is walking into Starbucks and saying “Large, iced, triple mocha, skim milk” (or something like that). His example is meant to show that certain domains (coffee shop) have their own lexicons (”Large, iced, triple mocha, skim milk”) for a reason and that we shouldn’t ignore that in our daily development. Neal also showed some great examples of using method-chaining (why don’t we write our Hibernate Criterion methods this way?) to achieve a sort of internal DSL in which your class setters always return the instance that you are dealing with. I thought this was one of the best seminars I have seen at NFJS so far (hence my rambling).

2. Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection (Neal Ford)
– Like Eric, I have many new tricks (Windows and Mac) I want to try thanks to this seminar. Now if I only had admin access on my PC so I could actually use some of these tips and tricks… This Monday I am turning off my email, putting a wall and ceiling on my cube, and blaming it on Neal.

3. Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality (Neal Ford)
– Man-crush? Nah he’s just a good speaker and I honestly think that these “productive programmer” seminars contain the most “real-world usable” information at NFJS. “Canonicality” is my new favorite word.

4. Ted Neward [Key Note]: Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages
– Ted is an awesome speaker. He’s opinionated, funny, and wears .NET t-shirts to Java conferences. 90% of what he was talking about was just plain over my head but nonetheless it was a very interesting keynote. Did anyone else know that “Pizza” was a programming language?

Hey Navy Boi Kyle. Remember that one time you danced with that really hot chick at “the moose”? That was awesome.

I can honestly say its been a while since I’ve seen something that I wanted to pee on. And then along comes the Piss Screen…

If you search for “satan skateboarding” on Google (try it) dabootski.com will be your first search result. Has this site sold its soul? Only I know.

This video makes me want to paint my place solid white and throw paint around.

Hello blog, its nice to see you again…