I am having fun at the No Fluff Just Stuff New England Symposium this weekend.
As always it is a pleasure to hang out with the fellow speakers, and the crowd. The “expert panels” are less and less focuses on technology itself, and more and more on process, and politics (e.g. outsourcing, JCP, etc).
I attended a talk on meta programming by Stu Halloway. It is one of the best talks I have been to for a long time. I always enjoy Stu’s talks as his style is top notch. There must have been 4 or 5 slides max. Instead of being a slide-reader, he cracks open his IDE of choice (IntelliJ IDEA for Java, Interface Builder/XCode for Objective C, emacs for aspectj? ;) ) and just goes for it. He codes as he goes a long, and you can’t help but sit there with a smile on your face, genuinely interested in what is going on.
The talk went through a myriad of meta-programming techniques, and how they solve particular problems. He had many gems in there like:
“Good design patterns get promoted to language features / Design patterns often exist to get around the lack of a language feature”
It was also great to see him show AspectJ as a tool. People have been doing the rounds giving AOP talks, but now I am seeing AOP discussed not as “A New Technology”, but just as part of another talk here and there. E.g. “This is a problem… oh by the way I used AOP to solve it like this”. This is a great trend for AOP.
Stu also gave me a demo of Near time Flow, which is fantastic. I can’t wait to get my hands on it, as a way to share, organize, and collaborate. I know that, although my Mac PowerBook will be happy, my DELL will be bummed out, as the initial support for Flow is Mac only… but that will hopefully change as time goes on.
