If you are a .NET person, you probably already know Ayende because of his incredible diligence as a blogger and his (usually pretty bold) opinions.

If you don’t know him, I bet you know the projects he is involved in: he is a major NHibernate committer, he is currently the lead of Castle MicroKernel/Windsor, and he maintains his own catalogue of projects (Rhino Mocks among others), and he is currently developing the NHibernate Profiler. Moreover, he is an active speaker, teacher, and consultant, and he has authored “Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo” which has recently been released on Manning.

Ayende is not only cool because of his unusually high activity level - he is also a very opinionated and pragmatic software developer, often undogmatic and incredibly self-confident, and in my opinion always very convincing. He is the origin of the JFHCI motto, he is never afraid of questioning “best practices” and sometimes playing the devil’s advocate, and he never seems to stop showing off his incredible depth AND breadth of knowledge and skill - lige e.g. when he gnawed his way through the CouchDB codebase in a few days, posting reviews of the code as he went along, not having read any Erlang code ever before he begun!

Another funny thing is that Ayende seems to identify himself with a rhinoceros, hence the naming scheme used in most of the artifacts he produces - and it takes only a few seconds of exposure to his nature to understand why he sees himself that way: rhinos are big and stubborn, and they push forward with great force. Rhinos have relatively small brains, however (at least compared to their size), but I assure you that this is one characteristic that he does NOT share with rhinos

I’m guessing that his presentation will show us some of the lesser-known features - a few NHibertricks, if you will - of some popular OR/M that he has put to use in various projects to reduce friction. As I am using some popular .NET OR/M myself in various projects as well, I am very curious to learn some of the tricks he has up his sleeve! I just KNOW this is going to be good!

When my companion and I wrote our Master’s Thesis “Garbage Collection in a gbeta Virtual Machine with the Train Algorithm” we read one of Urs Hölzle’s articles - “A Fast Write Barrier for Generational Garbage Collectors”. The article described how to implement an efficient write barrier, more specifically how to use a card-marking write barrier scheme. It was a short article without a lot of complex theory and it treated the subject in a clear way making it easy to understand and inspiring to read - like candy for the brain :-).

The purpose of a write barrier is to ensure that the garbage collector keeps track of the object heap each time a pointer is updated.

The write barrier in a generational garbage collector ensures that the remembered set of each generation is updated (in the train algorithm the remembered set is used between cars (mini generations within a train) and between trains (macro generations)). A remembered set (proposed by David Ungar) keeps track of which objects of a younger generations is referenced (kept alive) from an object residing in an older generation.

The card-marking write barrier scheme does this by dividing the heap into cards of size 2kwords. Every card has an associated bit in a separate bit vector. A store check simply marks the bit corresponding to the location being updated. At garbage collection time, the collector scans the bit vector and, whenever it finds a marked bit, examines all pointers in the corresponding card in the heap.

At JAOO Urs Hölzle will be speaking about “Energy-efficient cloud computing” and telling us how Google made their infrastructure scalable, cost effective and energy efficient.

The always lovely and interesting Linda Rising is giving two tutorials on Oct. 9. One about “Influence strategies for developers” and one about “the Power of Retrospectives“. I have attended tutorials by Linda before and you always get some action points for the monday after, when you return to work - she is very inspiring!

There are as many as three certified ScrumMaster classes with great trainers; Jeff Sutherland, Jens Oestergaard and Gabrielle Benefield. Unfortunately these are two-day-courses, so it is not possible to attend the other tutorials these days if you are to choose one of these classes. A real dilemma.

If you are into .NET there are several nice tutorials. Oren Eini is giving a tutorial on Rhino Mocks, which he is the creator of and Don Syme is talking about F# which he originally designed and implemented. Furthermore Nikhil Kothari will be available to teach you about Silverlight. Don’t miss these people if you are a .NET-developer!

The great Michael T. Nygard who wrote the book “Release it!” will be giving a full day tutorial about exactly that. A sure winner.

In the language department we have the “Advanced Ruby” tutorial by the always entertaining Sam Aaron and two Erlang tutorials by Francesco Cesarini: “Erlang for programming reliable systems” and “Erlang/OTP System Principles“.

You can also be “Testing Java Programs using JRuby” with Ola Bini and learning TDD with Steve Freeman.

Furthermore I have not even mentioned the tutorials by other it-gurus as Martin Fowler, Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Frank Buschmann, Dan North, Mary Poppendieck, Roman Pichler and lot of other great people… Take a look at the tutorial page yourself and see if there is something you like.

Watch the video:

But on top of that, she delivered a recipe for how to make your daughters into developers;

Force them to code!

Pamela was forced to code Java by her father, or else, there would be no allowance. And it worked, apparently. Well not the Java coding part of it, because when she left home….she left Java behind.  She can see the fun of coding and the power in it, because she was introduced to it in a very motivating way.

They say you get inspired at conferences, and my daughters will see just how inspired I am when I return home

http://tv.misaustralia.com/video/6681

Go Patrick!

Comments from anyone present at the talk?

The keynote is on doing effective Java programming - and if you are a Java programmer (as I am) it does hold relevance.

Throughout the next two slots, I put my faith in Michael Nygaard’s “Failure comes in flavours” talk, which he also did in Århus, DK. Back then I missed out on it, but fellow attendees recommended it. I’ll be there, Michael! (my other alternative would probably be the Google-big-website-talks).

After lunch I won’t be joining James Newkirk for Evolutionary Design - since his abstract doesn’t promise much more than Beck wrote about 10 years ago (XP). Avi Bryants abstract on his 1,001 Iterations: Product Design, Illustrated sounds like good fun - a talk on the development of some new data visualization tool - with excerpts from chatlogs and implementations in all sorts of languages. Gotta go there!

The upcoming slot doesn’t get me excited. Really. So I’ll skip it and lounge about, picking on some speaker or on snacks.

Dave Thomas’ talk “Hey You! Get On To My Cloud! - Application Development in the Clouds” is my favourite candidate - Dave seems to have been around forever and from the abstract I gather that he will give some more body to the 360° developer introduced by Kresten in the conference opening.

The last talk of the conference for me will definitely be Dan Norths “Pimp My Architecture” - Dan is a knowledgable guy (and good fun to hang in the bar with) - and the abstract sounds like if it’ll be a good talk to end the conference with.

For certain, you won’t want to miss out on the conference ending “meet the Speakers” event - if you didn’t get to pick on any speakers, nows the time - and I here that there  might be some beer involved ; )

IBM has brought their own barrista to the exhibition area - so all our cravings may be met - Long blacks, Flat whites, Espressos, Macchiatos, etc.

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Wuhu!

While keynotes and plenary assemblies are obvious choices, the rest of the conference sports three tracks - and since I haven’t got split-personality, choices will have to be made. Looking over the conference schedule, this is my personal idea of a path through the schedule:

Thursday morning:

While the two iPhone talks “Introduction to Objective-C” and “How to build and iPhone application in 45 minutes” do sing the sexy song from the iPhone siren, I’ll split attention between the language focused track - attending Douglas Crockford’s “Writing Large Applications in JavaScript”, and the process focused track, attending Bas Vodde’s “Scaling Scrum with feature teams”.

Thursday afternoon:

Succeeding lunch (and a perousal of exhibitor booths for free stuff), Amanda Lauchers “Domain Specific Languages and Language Oriented Programming” session looks interesting - having avoided actually doing any DSL’s (because they mainly come with some Ruby-evangelist or another) it might be time to get on the bandwagon.

While none of the talks in the next slot really get me excited “Speeding Ducks” by Avi Bryant looks to be my option - given the fun title ; )

Then it gets a bit more interesting: Glenn Vanderburg tends to be a good speaker, and although I shy away from Ruby (and Rails), the  subject of the talk could be quite relevant for some of the projects I’m on. However both the other talks in the slot: “Builds: From Good to Great” by Erik Doernenburg, and “Everything You Wanted to Know about Enterprise Database Access” by Patrik Linskey would probably be highly relevant. Both Patrik and Erik are very knowledgable on their subjects. In other words this is a tough choice - I’ll probably make mine at the last moment : )

Last slot of the day will probably go to the ‘All fluff no stuff’ (cloud computing) crowd, attending “Consistency, Storage, and Reliability in the Cloud” by Jonas S Karlsson - because scaling applications is never trivial - and he might just bring something interesting to the table. If I had not attended Linda Risings tutorial on retrospectives, I would however be very tempted to get wiser on estimation : )

Co-founder of Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes finishes the day talking on “Atlassian: An Australian Success Story” - and I’m hoping for an entertaining talk - fearing a promotional talk.

Thursday evening:

In any case, Thursday evening features the conference party - and I’m making sure to there to join in on the fun with speakers and other attendents - free food and the odd drink tends to get the spirit soaring (along with the head next morning : ) )

JAOO Nights -Sydney was held at the Convention Centre in the same space as the actual conference will be held. This was a good ‘dry run’ for JAOO coming up in 6 weeks time. Erik was on first covering TDD, which garnered several Q & A after his session. Joel from MS flew in just for the event, gave his talk on F# and had a band of people following him out to the taxi asking questions as he just managed to make the last fight out. We were very lucky to have him, even for just a few short hours.

In Melbourne we held the JAOO Night at the Victorian University, great venue! Steve Hayes was up first and had the audience’s attention from the outset. The crowd must have tired him out as he pulled up a chair for the Q & A session which lasted quite awhile. I think we learned from the Melbourne JAOO Night that Agile is a hot topic, and with a great speaker like Steve we should have covered this at each of the JAOO NIghts!

If all goes well we’d like to see these happen quarterly with a range of JAOO speakers on various topics. Thanks again to everyone who helped make this happen, especially the girls from QUT, Jorke at MS, and Martin Paulo for setting us up with the great venue in Melbourne.

If you’d like to see more JAOO Nights, let us know, and in particular, what speakers and topics would YOU like to see covered?

The long list of blog posts are a good way to get a feel for the conference and I hope that by highlighting them, the bloggers will notice our gratitude towards them; thank you for taking the time to write up the conference and spread the great ideas presented at QCon.

Steve Vinoski:
http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2009/03/18/qcon-london-the-best-one-yet/

Gojko Adzic:
http://gojko.net/tag/qcon/

Ola Bini:
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/02/qcon-london-and-ioke-geek-night/
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/03/qcon-london-tutorials/
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/03/qcon-london-wednesday-emerging-languages/
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/03/qcon-london-thursday/
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/03/qcon-london-friday/
http://olabini.com/blog/2009/03/qcon-london-summary/

Mark Edgington:
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/11/qcon-2009-the-science-of-computing-…
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/11/qcon-2009-the-web-platform/
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/11/web-oriented-architecture-woa/
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/11/cloud-data-persistence/
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/11/situation-normal-everything-must-change-…
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/12/transforming-software-architecture…
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/12/the-evolving-guardiancouk-architecture/
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/12/when-is-open-source-and-standardization-right/
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/13/a-story-about-a-technical-architect-pimp-my-architecture/
http://www.markedgington.com/2009/03/13/strategic-design-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

ALEX SCORDELLIS:
http://alexscordellis.blogspot.com/2009/03/my-day-at-qcon.html

Dionysios:
http://synodinos.net/2009/02/06/what-do-sir-tony-hoare…

Erik Johnson:
http://appside.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-london-2009.html

Attila Szegedi
http://constc.blogspot.com/2009/03/relativity-of-simultaneity.html

Mark Needham
http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2009/03/15/qcon-london-2009-the-power-of-value-power-…

About twitter:
http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/03/thinking-big-and-taking-tweet-sized-steps.html

Cleve Gibbon:
http://www.clevegibbon.com/wordpress/2009/03/18/qcon-london-2009-how-was-it-for-you/

Sam Aaron
http://dev.innovationfactory.nl/2009/03/23/qcon-london-2009-monday/
http://dev.innovationfactory.nl/2009/03/16/qcon-london-2009/

Glen Ford:
http://glen-ford.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-london-2009-tutorials-day-1.html
http://glen-ford.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-london-2009-tutorials-day-2.html
http://glen-ford.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-london-2009-conference-day-1.html
http://glen-ford.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-london-2009-conference-day-2.html
http://glen-ford.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-london-2009-conference-day-3.html

Pedro Pimentel
http://www.pedropimentel.com/2009/03/20/qcon-london-2009/

Niksilver.com
http://niksilver.com/2009/03/18/qcon-london-2009-a-few-lessons-learned/

The Nameless one:
http://tnlessone.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/qcon-london-2009/

Bryan Che:
http://bryanche.blogspot.com/2009/03/qcon-presentation-slides-for-download.html

Ulf Wiger:

http://ulf.wiger.net/weblog/2009/03/20/qcon-london-good-fun/

Danny Lagrouw:

http://www.blog.dannynet.net/archives/133

If you have seen or written a blog post about QCon London not on this list, I would love it, if you left me a comment on this blog post.

At JAOO Australia we have invited, among others, James Ward, who will share with us how to develop sexier software with Flex. James’ focus is that the user will enjoy the sexier software, but I can assure you, it will also be good for you.

Another hot topic at this conference is iPhone app development, where Patrick Linskey will take you through the process of building an iPhone app in 45 minutes.  Imagine building an application, that will be available to all iPhone users in the world, in only 45 minutes! This is surely democratizing the mobile development for all developers.You might even be able to quit your day job. The number of iPhone users is growing by the hour. Luckily not everybody is an iPhone user yet, otherwise, as Stacey Higginbotham says; “we’d never get anything done.”

I am an iPhone user, but not yet an iPhone developer. And you? Are you about to quit your day job to become an iPhone developer?

In december 2008 the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship was drafted and since there has been a call for arms to sign this manifesto saying;

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:

Not only working software, but also well-crafted software.

Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value.

Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals.

Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships.

That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.

At JAOO 2007 there was a great trend towards discussing what it ment to be a professional developer and about calling it craftsmanship - this discussion was lead by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob wrote “Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship”) and Pete McBreen (Pete wrote “Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative”).

The CTO of Trifork, Kresten Krab Thorup, did an interview with Robert C. Martin, Pete McBreen and Michael Feathers about this notion of Craftsmanship and we shot this video of it:

At our latest conference, QCon London, the speakers and attendees used Twitter to great effect.  You can read the tweets at: #qcon-tweets

What you might see is how the presentations were rated in real-time, and this had some interesting consequences.

First, sometimes attendees stay in the “coffee-area” during breaks, because they cannot decide what to see. We could watch them follow Twitter and when a presentation was rated good, they would go to that instead of staying outside the presentations. Second, they would actually leave a presentation which they had regretted going to, if they saw a well-rated presentation on Twitter. For the speakers it could be wonderful as well as hard to read the tweets about their performance, but they could get instant evaluations. Luckily most of them didn’t actually read the tweets until their presentation was over.

If you haven’t tried to tweet yet, this is the day to start. But beware, it is addictive!

Going on the big stage right after Sir Tony Hoare was probably not easy but Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer did a great job with their “The web platform” presentation. They don’t even look nervous: