I am enjoying speaking at the Denver No Fluff. As always it is a pleasure to hang out with a lot of smart people. I got a chance to observe a couple of good talks too. Dave Thomas is fantastic, and I really enjoyed listening to him talk about Mock Objects, and Decoupling. He does a really good job at really explain things, and getting into harder to explain areas. He had a great set of slides talking about creating methods on objects that express extent, and making sure that you don’t have “Train Wrecks” like:
order.getCustomer().getAddress().getState()
but rather have:
order.caculateTax()
This way you have decoupled your Order from the mess below (what if you change your interface so a Customer has a MailingAddress and a BillingAddress?)
This morning I heard Erik Hatcher’s talk on Lucene (he is working on Lucene in Action for Manning). Lucene is such a great piece of technology, and it is really interesting to see Nutch, the open source google-a-like.
In my last blog on the Chicago No Fluff I talked about the bizarre things that happened… mostly to do with Jay and his driving. This time everything is going smoothly ;) I went to see Matrix Revolutions with some of the speakers, and then had fun playing an interesting game called “Mafia”. I really do enjoy this small symposiums where you get quality time with people.
