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Rod Johnson - founder of Spring - talked about why the industry moved to lightweight open source. An interesting talk starting with an odyssey through the history of Enterprise Java. It is very interesting that J2EE was created by a bunch of companies that can benefit a lot from a complex approach. Rod called this "the growth of the complexity industry". It not only includes evil big corporations that create standards for products they want to sell. It also includes architects benefitting from being one of a few that actually understands what is going on and developers aiming to get these complex technologies on their resumes. It is kind of a sad story. More recently it happened again with the SOA buzz. An important point though is that standards isn't necessarily a bad thing. The standards forming J2EE is probably one important reason to why Java still is a choice for businesses. Without a formalized approach to the server side it is not hard to imagine an alternative road where Java would have been marginalized and we would have had a different landscape where probably Microsoft would have been a winner. All in all the talk was a really interesting retrospective with lots of hope in the future. There has never been a better time to be a developer than now.

 

Hardy made his talk on Hibernate Search and it has sharpened a lot since the first time I heard it and it was nice to see. The talk makes it painfully clear that doing full text search of things yourself is really not a good option. Hibernate Search takes care of all the infrastructural things you need when building search functionality on top of Hibernate ORM. Cool stuff.

 

Henrik Kniberg compared Kanban to Scrum in a good and useful way. His main point that there are different tools to use when setting up a software project and it depends what tool is appropriate for a certain project. If a project doesn't work it is not because the tool is bad - it is because the tool is badly used or because it is the wrong tool for the situation.

 

Kris Lander and Gus Power - No excuses : concept to cash every week. These 2 guys had perhaps the greatest slides but were perhaps not the most experienced speakers. It didn't matter at all since they had lots of cool experiences to tell about what works and what doesn't work when building serious systems with agile methods. 

 

Dave Thomas could have skipped his slides altogether and just told us lots of anecdotes from his immense experience in the business. It was an entertaining and opinionated talk with harsh comments about lots of things. For example what is the point of building big enterprise OO whatnot systems when most of them actually are simple CRUD systems? Isn't objects kind of overkill in all these cases? Or the joke about agile mentors: they are just unemployed smalltalk developers. A great ending to a good day of interesting talks.

 

Finally I managed to run 7.5 kms and I am really proud of myself!