Last Sunday, the 17th July of 2011, we held another Dev Brunch at our company.
A Dev Brunch is an event that brings three main ingredients together: developers, food and software industry related topics. Given enough time (there is never enough time!), we chat, eat, learn and laugh the whole evening through. Most of the stories and chitchat that is told cannot be summarized and has little value outside its context. But most participants bring a little topic alongside their food bag, something of interest they can talk like 10 minutes about. This blog post summarizes at least the official topics and gives links to additional resources.
Conference review of the Java Forum Stuttgart 2011
The Java Forum Stuttgart is an annual conference held by the Java User Group Stuttgart. It’s the biggest regional Java event and always worth a visit (as long as you understand the german language). This year, the talks stagnated a bit around topics that are mostly well-known.
The best talk was given by Michael Wiedeking from MATHEMA Software GmbH in Erlangen. The talk titled “The next big (Java) thing”, but mostly addressed the history and current state of Java in an entertaining and thought-provoking way. The premise was that you have to know the past and present to anticipate the future. The slides don’t represent the talk well enough, but here’s a link anyway.
Another session introduced the PatternTesting toolkit, a collection of helper classes and useful features that enrich the development of unit testing. Alongside the other spice you can add to unit tests, this project might be worth a look. My favorite was the @Broken annotation that ignores a test case until a given date. It’s like an @Ignore with a best-before date.
There were the usual introductory talks, for example about CouchDB and git/Egit. They were well-executed, but lacked a certain thrill if you heard about the projects before.
As a personal summary, the Java world lacks the “next big thing” a bit.Two buzz products for the next year might be Eclipse Jubula (for UI testing) and Griffon (for desktop application development).
Conference review of the Karlsruhe Entwicklertag (developer day) 2011
The Karlsruhe Entwicklertag is another annual conference, spanning several days and presenting top-notch talks and sessions. It’s the first address for software developers in Karlsruhe that want to stay up to date with current topics and products.
Some topics were presented nearly identically to the Java Forum Stuttgart (but half a year earlier if that matters), while other tracks (like the Pecha Kucha talks) can only be found here.
The buzz product for the next year might be Gerrit (for code review) and Eclipse Jubula again (for UI testing).
As a personal summary, even this conference lacked a certain drive towards real new “big picture” topics. But maybe, that’s just allright given all the hype of the last years.
The GRASP principles
This topic contained hands-on software development knowledge about the nine principles named “GRASP” or General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns/Principles. There is nothing really new about the GRASP principles, they will only give you common names for otherwise mostly unnamed best practices or fundamental design paradigms and patterns.
We even went through some educational slides that summarize the principles. The most discussion arose about the name “Pure Fabrication” for classes without a relation to the problem domain.
If you are an average experienced software developer, spend a few minutes and scan the GRASP principles so you can combine the name with the specific content.
First-hand experiences of combining work and children
We are well within the best age to raise children. So this topic gets a lot attention, specifically the actual tipps to survive the first two years with kids and how to interact with the different administrative bodies. Germany is a welfare state, but nobody claimed that welfare should be easy or logical. We’ve learned a lot about different reference dates and unusual time partitioning.
Another insight was that working less than 40 percent isn’t really worth the hassle. You are mostly inefficient and aware of it.
That’s all, folks
As always, we shared a lot more information and anecdotes. If you want to participate at one of our Dev Brunches, let us know. We are open for guests and really interested in your topics.
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