Archive for November, 2008

JCP Executive Commitee Results

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I applied this year to the EC elections of the JCP for a seat on the Java SE board. I got 15.8% of the vote, but alas, did not win a seat. The PR release for this can be read here.

Standard / Enterprise Edition Executive Committee
Number of eligible voters: 948
Percent voting members casting votes: 26.9%

The top two members have been elected and will serve for the next three years.

Intel Corp. 46.4%
Keil, Werner 24.9%
McCullough, Matthew 15.8%
Tiwari, Shashank 12.7%

Other NFJS Denver Reviews

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Several other attendees, namely Tim Berglund and Mike Brevoort took some excellent notes on the specific sessions they attended at No Fluff Just Stuff. If you want a recap of the sessions so you can best choose what to attend when NFJS hits your city, take a moment to read their summaries.

No Fluff Just Stuff and Open Source in the Enterprise

Monday, November 17th, 2008

My attendance this weekend of the NFJS tour in Denver, CO proved once again to be as valuable as ever. With a heavy penchant for Open Source and its rapid innovation, the speakers showcased technologies that weren’t even on people’s vocabulary lists just last year. And take note, these are not just technologies for the sake of technology. The speakers such as Ken Sipe, Venkat Sumbramaniam, Stu Halloway, Neal Ford, and more served out a steady stream of reasons why each new technology is a game-changer in its given space.

A quick top 5 list of the best presentations (that I attended):

  • Hacking, The Dark Arts by Ken Sipe
  • Towards an Evolutionary Design by Venkat Subramaniam
  • Git by Stu Halloway
  • Failing with 100% Test Coverage by Stu Halloway
  • Mylin by Brian Sam-Bodden

If you have an opportunity to get your employer to purchase a seat for you to attend a stop on the NFJS tour, do it. If you are self employed, then don’t even think about not going. This is one of the best ROI’s of any conference going today. As Ken Sipe said in his keynote address, you must increase your networking, you must increase your knowledge portfolio, and you must continue to constantly change and improve as we IT professionals work in literally one of the most dynamic industry verticals in the world.

A very interesting article from InformationWeek also touches on the impact of Open Source, like TerraCotta in the Enterprise. With so much Open Source presented at NFJS, one can’t help but imagine the NFJS attendees are the drivers of this migration.