The google data API talk concentrated on decisions behind the selection of REST over SOAP; basically RESTs four operations get,put, post and delete are likely to cover 90% of your needs. Also the extensions they have developed around query, authentication, concurrent operations and batch updates. These concepts were tied in nicely to examples of use and comments regarding the benefits of building on or with standards; less need to document a big one.
I found the speaker a little monotone, but the content of the talk was very interesting. It provided a very clear view of how Merrel Lynch deals with the billions of daily messages, produced by there systems globally. The break down of message precedence and the aim of automated fixing of an issue within an 18 second window, was very interesting. The compounded issue of differing vendor error messages, dashboards and the overarching job of combining these into monitoring dashboards at a zone, site, region and global levels was a real eye opener.
All to much about the product, gave up after 10 mins and went to the banking track.
I already use Jungle Disk which is the amazon S3 (simple storage service). But this talk went through the entire set of services, giving enough insight into each to provoke thought, as to potential uses. Of great interest to me was the Elastic compute cloud, allowing for fast scalability and setup, with a time, bandwidth and computing power pricing model. The up and coming Simple DB, an object database looked very interesting.
I think that Eric is a good speaker and the Eclipse project is interesting,but was it worthy of a keynote slot? I say this as it ended up as more of a product pitch for Jazz, which looked good in one way, but only if you are going to base your team around it, and i believe that there are inherent risks there; integration with eclipse scares me off. I believe its getting more to a stage where you find teams picking an ide/tools based on the problem space i.e netbeans mobile and profile tools are excellent. Therefore, opting for an integrated jazz type product ends up reducing choice.
I was not quite sure what to pick today, after almost going for Java Performance i opted for the Agile route. The session was not quite what i expected from the title or excerpt, but still very enjoyable. David Anderson came at agile almost from the standpoint of standard problem software projects. He looked at how these could be edged towards the agile world through clear identification of the value stream (process) and the examination of metrics around this. His key take outs that quality should be the focus and reducing the work in progress (WIP) leads to efficiency: in effect shorter cycles or sprints work far better than large batches of work. Having concentrated on agile methodologies, this viewpoint of how to get to agile inspired lots of thought; it is often the case that a covert agile approach must be followed, where a full and open method such as Scrum, cannot be taken.
My favourite comment from David ‘ the sign of a poorly managed department is one where the manager is always complaining of being busy’ this leading to a lack of change; see my previous post on the book Slack, which this comment ties into nicely.
written on my N810, so please excuse grammar and spelling
My last five conferences had been in San Francisco, so the howling winds and buckets of rain which destroyed my umbrella did not put me in the best, or driest of moods. However, i had registered for DSL with Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons, so i held hope. They did not disappoint, presenting a work in progress for a new book that covered Internal, External and Language Workbench definitions of DSL.
While DSL have been around for many years, this attempt at clarification, was clear and well thought out. The definition :
The easiest entry point seemed to be Internal DSL (those created within your current language of choice, or by investigating and branching out into other complementary languages External DSL’s, i.e Groovy or JRuby to complement Java. A potentially more difficult External DSL’s route was to write your own DSL, this offering great power and control, but potential high-complexity as these are home spun definitions, lexers and parsers and this will be alien to many. Finally of great interest were Languages Workbenches, which in the case of Jetbrains MPS is a multitude of DSL’s that go together to form the MPS tool for creating DSL’s. This and other similar work has the potential to change the way we work, some are near to production quality, so we will see.
My take out was that the use of DSL’s needs to get more prominence, in a similar way to Agile development; which has taken years to gain main stream prominence. Through the use of DSL’s developers will gain skills and solve problems in a more elegant fashion, so it’s a definite win and with a Martin Fowler book on the subject it should get wider prominence.
(Written on my N810, so excuse grammar and spelling)
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