Things I learned at JAOO 2007

1. Martin Fowler may be one of the great minds of our engineering age, but his accent sounds a lot like MR. Bean. He's also not a great social figure and also sems to speak when spoken to. Eccentric.
2. Robert C. Martin is a good Drummer. He played the drums for me while I was doing some of my songs at the first ever JAOO Jam Session.  He's also working on a new book called "Clean Code". I suggested he might want to take a look at Code Craft so that he has some differentiators from it. I still don't get why people call him uncle bob, but he says a friend of his called him that once and it stuck. From now on just call me Uncle Roy.
3. Jim Coplien seems to bring out the worst in me. In his session about Scrum and Architecture he publicly denounced TDD and said (quoting) "TDD will deteriorate your architecture" and spoke loudly against using it. Him outspokenness seems to have hit me where it hurts because it led to a full hour of me and him going at each other outside the lecture hall with people gathering around as if it was a boxing match. The day after that I decided to go to the Open Spaces sessions at JAOO and open up a new topic called "TDD+Scrum=Good?". about 12 people showed up and Jim was one of them. For more than an hour we all exchanged ideas and some back and forth took place (lots of banter). I'll have a whole separate post about this discussion later on. The bottom line is - TDD can be misunderstood which can lead to people saying "don't use it" which can lead to people actually listening to this very bad advice which can lead to world chaos and the eventual death of the world. So don't listen to Jim.
4. Mark Polack is a great guy to talk to and is the main driving force behind Spring.NET. Spring.NET is much more powerful than I initially thought. He's working hard on V 1.1 of that these days. He did a session on Spring.NET at JAOO. He doesn't blog enough. In fact, I can't even find his blog.
5. Hamilton Verissimo is the main force behind the Castle Project and is a very smart and shy person. he also is a good listener and thinks twice before saying anything. I would love to talk to him more but I always fear I will say the wrong thing next to him (he feels so polite!). He's the opposite of the Israeli state of mind.
6. The Danish crowed is just as quite and polite as the Tech-Ed Europe crowd or the DevDays Belgium Crowd.
7. I really like the voting system on the sessions. As you leave you get the choice of taking a yellow, green or red note. you pick one and drop it in a big bucket as you leave the room. then they count the reds greens and yellows. very agile although I suspect they may be missing some important specific feedback this way.
8. A Guitar that starts out with you as flight baggage will not necessarily find its way through 3 connection flights. It may arrive 3 days later as you prepare to leave back home.
9. There are some great people at JAOO and I got to play with some of them at the JAM session. great idea!
10. Free wi-fi in your hotel room will allow you to run utorrent so that when you leave back home you will have downloaded lots of nice TV shows to view on the place ride back home.
11. Erlang is making a comeback. It's been there 20 years mainly used by the telecom industry for parallel high volume stuff. now it's the talk of the conference as the answer to multi-core and scalable application programming. I don't remember who told me this nice sentence but it went like this: "I guess its true what they say. Everything has already been invented 20 years ago". true.