No Fluff Just Stuff 2007: Recap of the Northern Virginia Software Symposium
This past weekend the No Fluff Just Stuff 2007 tour was in Reston for the Northern Virginia Software Symposium. This was my first time at a NFJS event, but I had heard nothing but good things from those who had attended in the past and I was really looking forward to it. Needless to say, it did not disappoint.
The slate of speakers included Ben Hale, Brian Sletten, David Bock, David Geary, David Hussman, Howard Lewis Ship, Jared Richardson, Jason Hunter, Karthik Shyamsunder, Mark Richards, Nathanial Schutta, Neal Ford, Scott Davis, Scott Leberknight, and Venkat Sunramaniam. While I didn’t have the opportunity to catch every speaker, those I did were all excellent. The speakers and their presentations were all of a high quality, which isn’t always something you can always count on from your typical conference. The event was capped at 250 participants, which gave the whole affair much more of a personal feel.
The first presentation I attended was David Hussman’s Agile Immersion. This may have been the highlight of the conference for me. After a brief explanation of some of the concepts, the room was broken up into teams of eight people with each team choosing a project, and each person on the team assigned roles such as developer, tester, product owner, and sponsor. Each team had to go through a couple of SCRUM iterations in order to get a feel for the process. The interaction with the other participants was excellent, and along with some great coaching from David, this exercise turned into a fun learning experience. Later in the day I also caught David’s Executable Documentation presentation which was also very good. His presentations are very engaging and I would recommend trying to catch one if given the opportunity.
I finished up Friday with Venkat Subramaniam’s Domain Driven Design talk. Having had the opportunity to review his book Practices of an Agile Developer as well as hearing him interviewed in a NFJS podcast, he was one of the speakers I was really looking forward to. Unfortunately, this is the only talk of his I was able to attend.
The interest in dynamic languages was quite evident. Sessions on Groovy were prevalent and Neal Ford also did a few sessions that addressed Ruby/JRuby. Of those, I attended the intro to JRuby talk as well as an excellent session on building Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) in Java, Groovy, and Ruby. DSLs are something I’ve been hearing more and more about lately and this session definitely whetted my appetite for more. Neal also presented a session on implementing SOAs that was very informative and practical.
Ben Hale from Interface21 presented multiple sessions related to Spring. I really enjoyed Ben’s style and it’s quite obvious he knows Spring inside and out. His session on Spring Web Flow was very good, and this is something I’m going to have to look at a little more closely for my job.
Not to go unmentioned was a though provoking session by Mark Richards concerning agile architecture, as well as a session on Spring and Hibernate integration patterns given by Scott Leberknight. I wrapped up the conference with Jared Richardson’s session on building teams. I am a big fan of his book Ship It, so I didn’t want to miss this one. This was a very enjoyable session with lots of audience participation. Needless to say, the conference ended on a high note for me.
It seems the excellent buzz surrounding NFJS is well justified. I will be making every effort to attend next year.