Even though I have been kind of occupied mentally by the fact that I was going to do a presentation, I still managed to catch a few points from attending other presentations during the day.
First session
First, I went and saw Rob Ashton talk about building and testing Javascript applications, which was mostly about Node.js and a bunch of libraries that can be used when you’re doing serious Node development.
It strikes me that project names in the Node world are way cooler than in .NET…. We have NUnit, NBehave, NServiceBus, NWhatever… Node has Mocha, Zombie, Mocha-Cakes, etc.
Also, Rob was delightfully whimsy as he switched between virtual desktops with terminals and Vim at epileptic seisure-inducing speed, so I was definitely entertained, and also enlightened (although I have messed a bit with Node.js already, so I already knew most of the stuff he talked about).
Second session
I decided to stay for Rob’s second talk on game development in HTML5, which was an introduction to three ways of drawing animated graphics with HTML5. Rob gave a great overview over “happy face/sad face” facts about canvas vs. DOM manipulation vs. WebGL, so even though I don’t care about creating games in HTML5, it was nice to learn about how few limits there are in the browser.
Third session
After an elfish amount of vikingish lunch, I went and checked out Mantas Klasavičius who talked about something that he calls metric-driven development. Basically, Mantas talked about how to collect metrics from running applications and use them i various ways, both as a means to know where to improve the application, but also – as I understood it – almost as a gamification thing that inspired development teams to take responsibility and do even better. Even though Mantas is from Lithuania and thus was a little bit challenged language-wise, he succeeded in conveying a bunch of excellent points that I intend to take home and implement right away!
Fourth session
My fourth session was on F# with Tomas Petricek, and I guess it was ok – but at this point, I had to mess a little bit with my slides because I had suddenly realized my last example was too complex to be explained with words alone, so I was trying to follow Tomas at the same time as I was drawing a sequence diagram in my notebook and editing the iPhone photo to make it ready to be included in a slide.
Tomas touched very briefly on some of the cool features of F#, and must admit that I would have loved a full session about programming with actors in F# instead of the TypeProvider thing that Tomas talked about.
Fifth session
…was my own session on Rebus. I think it went fairly well – for once I had had time to actually prepare the talk, so I had my tongue laid out in the right way or something 🙂 at least I didn’t stutter and mumble as much as I usually do when I’m forced to talk in English for an extended amount of time… Here’s the slide deck (PDF): Taking The Hippie Bus To The Enterprise. Sample code is on GitHub: Warm Crocodile Rebus demos.
Sixth session
was on dealing with global performance by Steven Singh, which I attended because Steven had forgotten to bring a computer 🙂 so, being a nice guy and all, I let him use my computer to download his slides and use it during the presentation, even though it meant that I would miss out on Stefan’s ServiceStack all the things!-talk. That was actually too bad, so I must see if can get a chance to pick Stefan’s brain later.
Moreover, I was really tired at this point, and I felt like some FaceTime™ with my two kids at home, so I went out for about 30 minutes during the presentation. I can’t judge whether the presentation was good or bad, but I got the impression that Steven had a hard time keeping the common thread in what he wanted to say. It may be my disability to follow though, so I’m not entirely sure of this.
Conclusion
1st day ended with lunch together with most of the attendees, and I got to talk to Roy Osherove, Jimmy Bogard, and Derick Bailey – three really inspiring people! It seemed that Jimmy and Derick are totally buying in on Udi’s service-oriented-all-the-things way of thinking that permeates all layers of entire stack from database to UI widgets.
Also, Derick had experience with composite UIs with Prism (which is what we’re working with in our big trading application at d60), and obviously also with Marionette which he made as a composite UI framework in Javascript.
All in all it has been a great day! Now i want a shower, and then I want to sleep!