My workplace sent me to No Fluff Just Stuff to attend the conference. Some of the interesting bits about the conference were:

  • Garbage Collection in the VM

    • Lead to the following questions

      • If there a way to do leak testing in unit tests? (VC++ provides heapdump checking and you can do it there)

      • Where is the memory indexed at?

      • Is it possible to modify the code cache?

    • Ken Sipe is a great speaker and I managed to have lunch with him.

  • Tracer Bullet architecture

    • Advocates slow development (make sure things work on a smaller scale before escalating higher)

    • Some redefining the existing development change process, and some parts naming work patterns.

    • Advocated for many of the circuit breaker/fault resistance that was already baked into Akka

  • LAMBDA Architecture

    • Mostly advocated in a more efficient datacenter using Mesos/DCOS.

  • Metaprogramming and AOP programming with Groovy

    • This was a great talk on how closures can take in state

    • Went over some basic built up on extending the language through Abstract Syntax Transforms

  • Encryption/Security

    • Mostly reviewed encryption algorithms and briefly talked about exploits

    • The talks on the exploits were interesting

    • Oddly enough, the conference talked a lot about the Heartbleed bug.

      • Sidenote: The events and context surrounding this bug are very strange.

Other notes

The conference loaned out conference ipads to keep notes on and rebroadcast the sessions. I found this to be similar to having a laptop in the classroom. Mostly it just led to distraction.

Things I would have liked to see more in the conference

  • Talk some about Scala

    • There were many mentions of Groovy, but other than the Metaprogramming/AOP they were just mentions

  • Discuss things like Akka or new methodologies

  • Try to avoid boilerplate talks on Spring

  • Label the sessions as Intro/Intermediate/Advanced