Follow-up to our Dev Brunch July 2010

Last Saturday, we held our Dev Brunch for July 2010. The setting of this brunch was unusual, as we didn’t brunch, but cooked spaghetti (to be exact: had spaghetti cooked while we ranted about different workplaces). We also didn’t start in the late morning, but in the early afternoon. Later on, a LAN computer game party was held in our office, limiting our time-frame a bit. Due to rainy weather, we stayed inside and discussed the topics listed below.

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 continue to allow presence over topics. Our topics for the brunch were:

• Your own Java ResourceBundle implementation – Since Java 6, there is the new possibility to add your own ResourceBundle formats under the generic API using ResourceBundle.Control. We discussed several possible use cases and had an example case mocked up in source code. The API enables you to do what was impossible beforehands but isn’t as polished as it could be. Worth a closer look if you want to combine ResourceBundle with your i18n database, for example.
• Thoughts on “Team Rooms” – Lately, there was a very good blog entry about team rooms and how they are introduced by Martin Fowler. The article is titled “The rise of the cattle office” and has some valid points. But nearly every attendee of the brunch likes working in a team room. We had a great discussion that can’t be summarized in a single sentence, but one advice: Mr. Fowler, please put up some nicer teaser image in your bliki!
• Retrospective of the Java Forum Stuttgart 2010 – The Java Forum Stuttgart 2010 is a local conference dedicated to Java. It grew into a 1k+ developer’s meeting for southwest germany. You cannot avoid to meet former colleagues and chat non-stop in the pauses. The presentations are mostly very professional and worthwhile. We learnt a bit about long-term serialization issues (put a version in your XML namespace!), better JUnit (Rules are cool!), some Dependency Injection myths (though this presentation could have been snappier) and got introduced to Apache Hadoop (Map/Reduce at its best). Embedded Java still is the hell we remembered it to be. But the best presentation of the day clearly was Dr. Simon Wiest talking about Hudson and advanced techniques to speed up your build.

Retrospection of the brunch

The group of attendees was small again, with several firsttime guests. This helped the disgression factor a lot, we talked a lot about all kinds of topics that didn’t make it on the list above. The time and setup was a bit unusual, but the brunch itself was fun and insightful as always.