Follow-up to our Dev Brunch March 2010

Yesterday we held our Dev Brunch for this month. It was the second brunch in our new office, with some attendees visiting it for the first time. The reactions were the same: “I want to move in here!”. The topics were of different kinds, from live presentations to mere questions open for discussion.

The Dev Brunch

If you want to know more about the meaning of the term “Dev Brunch” or how we implement it, have a look at the follow-up posting of the brunch in October 2009. We continued to allow presence over topics. These topics were discussed today:

• Singleton vs. Monostate – We all know that Singletons are bad for your test coverage, they make a poor performance on your dependency chart and are generally seen as “evil”. We discussed the Monostate pattern and if it could solve some of the problems Singletons inherently bring along. Based upon the article from Uncle Bob, we concluded that Monostates are difficile at least and don’t help with the abovementioned problems.
• What is “agile” for you? – This simple question provoked a lot of thoughts. You can always obey the Agile Manifesto word by word without understanding what the deeper motives are. The answer that fitted best was: “You can name it when you see it”. We concluded that it’s easy and common practice to label any given process “agile” just to sound modern.
• News around Yoxos – If you are using Eclipse, you’ve certainly heard about Yoxos already. Now during the EclipseCon 2010, good news were announced. We got a sneak peek on the new Yoxos Launcher and how it will help in managing your pack of Eclipse installations. We are looking forward to become beta testers because we can’t wait to use it.
• Teaser talk for “Actors in Scala” – The actor paradigm for parallel programming is a promising alternative to threads. While threads are inevitable complex even for simple tasks, actors seem to recreate  a more natural approach to parallelism. This talk was only the teaser for a more in-depth talk next time, with hands-on code examples.
• Properties in Scala – This talk had lots of code examples and hands-on discussion about the Properties feature of Scala. Properties are an elegant way to reduce your boilerplate code for simple objects and to sustain compatibility with Java frameworks that rely on the Java Beans semantics. We clearly understood the advantages, but ran into some strangeness related to the conjoint namespaces of fields and methods along the way. Scala isn’t Java, that’s for sure.
• Introduction to Prezi – Prezi is a modern presentation tool in the tradition of the dreaded PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote. It adds a twist to your presentation by adding two new dimensions: laying out everything on a big single canvas (no slides!) and relying heavily on zooming effects. The online editor is surprisingly usable, yet simple and lightweight. If you want to meet prezi, check out the introduction prezis and the showcase on their homepage.

As usual, the topics ranged from first-hand experiences to literature research. For additional information, check out the comment sections. Comments and resources might be in german language.

Retrospection of the brunch

We keep getting better in timing our talks. We nearly maintained our time limit and didn’t hurry anything. For the next brunch, we are looking forward to use our new office roof garden to brunch and talk in the springtime sun.