Øredev 2009 – Day 1

The conference was opened with a keynote by Marc Lesser. He talked about how to accomplish more by doing less. It was a kind of usual opening of a technology oriented conference, but I guess a bit of zen thinking early in the morning can only do us good.

Ola Bini presented the folding language Ioke. I will definitely download this and play around with it. Hopefully, I can use it in some presentation in near future. Really cool and fun!

The next presentation I attended was Neal Ford’s presentation about XP in practice. Nothing really new there, but more a confirmation that what I feel we are doing right applies to others as well. And, more valuable, tips and techniques for how to improve on what we are doing not so right. At last a kind of nerdy way of looking at pair programming:

  • 100 eyes
  • 010 brains
  • 001 mind

Continuing on the agile track, Dan North gave an excellent talk about our obsession with efficiency. The three key points to remember from his talk is:

  • You get what you measure
  • Not all vendors are bad guys
  • Efficiency isn’t effective

Back to the languages track, I attended a talk by Neal Ford where he compared Groovy and JRuby. It gave me a pretty good comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of both languages.

The only session on the Java track was a disappointment. The only thing I really got from this presentation was that I could charge my netbook’s batteries. Still running OpenSolaris on it, by the way, and is generally happy with it!

Last technical presentation today was about clojure. Kind of tough thing to jump into this late in the afternoon, but the presenter, Stuart Halloway, did a great job.

In the afternoon keynote, Cameron Purdy did a comparison of Java and C++.

Overall experience from the first day of the conference is good. It is impressive that they have gathered so many international speakers. If I should pick on something, it has to be that the opening of the conference would benefit from being a little more flashy. Maybe have the opener learn his speech and practice on the English pronunciation…?

And now, it is time for mingle and beer!

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