A Weekend at No Fluff Just Stuff

0zach • 31st Jul 2007 • Uncategorized • business, code

I just wrapped up a weekend attending No Fluff Just Stuff. To put it in a nutshell, it was the best technical conference I’ve ever attended, from the standpoint of the value it pays back for your time and money. Its salient features are:

1. it is a traveling show, so you don’t fly to it, it flies to you. This alone makes it cheap cheap cheap by conference standards.
2. attendance is capped at 250, so you have real face-to-face contact with the experts.
3. it is relentlessly pragmatic. This is about real projects, real clients, and real techniques. There is no vaporware and no technology that is only theoretically useful.
4. it (usually) meets on the weekend. Aside from the obvious effect that it doesn’t interrupt your work week, your fellow attendees are automatically of a higher order, because they want to learn about software on the weekend. I’m not saying this makes us better people — maybe the opposite — but it does weed out the casual.

It’s very technical, and very focused on Java in the so-called enterprise, though a couple of these guys are also Ruby advocates, and there are sessions to match.

Probably the best thing about NFJS is that the speakers are all exemplary engineers and professionals, so for the purpose of career development they are very good role models. I came away with a list of things I just have to start doing better:

• automated tests: I don’t have to be sold on the value; It’s time to stop talking about it and start doing it.
• mastering the tools, IDE: Eclipse and IntelliJ can do amazing things if you let them. Here’s a hint: if you do any of it with the mouse, you’re less productive than you could be. The speakers are living advertisements for IntelliJ IDEA. They almost have me convinced that $500 is a small price to pay for what it gives you.
• mastering the tools, languages: dynamic languages are in. I can’t really play with the big dogs without being able to apply JavaScript and Ruby or Groovy or Beanshell wherever they make sense.
• public speaking: stories make for good speaking, and they don’t even have to be your own stories. Even on a technical topic, people want to hear what it has to do with their lives.
• Java is not dead yet, though it has been sleepy there for a while. It is evolving to a platform for other languages, so you can shake off the limitations of Java-the-language if you want.

If you want to sample a good cross-section of the kinds of things you will see and hear at NFJS, take a look at their book, the NFJS Anthology.

By the way, the speakers are also living advertisements for Apple MacBooks and Mac OS X, but I’m already on board that train! TOOT TOOT