JavaOne 2010

JavaOne 2010 is officially over but for me it's still going on. I had the opportunity to give a technical presentation and lead a BOF (Bird Of a Feather) talk as well. PDF files of the slides for both are posted on the Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, and Oracle Develop On Demand web site. As far as I know, you must have attended one of the three conferences to have access, so I'm looking at posting the files to GitHub too. I'll update this post with the URL once they're up there. I'll post more about JavaOne after I've had a chance to catch up on my sleep.

I got back Friday morning around 6:00 AM, crashed for a couple hours, then got in line for registration at the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium. It starts at noon on Friday and ends around 8:00PM; then goes all day Saturday and Sunday.

Normally, I stay for the dinner and KeyNote on Friday but not this time. My friend Charlie and I missed the dinner and keynote so we could attend a special Google Technology User Group meeting where Josh Marinacci of the Palm Developer Relations team talked about (and demo'd) cross-device mobile app development. Josh was involved with Swing and JavaFX before leaving Sun, and now he's with HP evangelizing the WebOS platform and cross platform development. He's scary smart and very passionate about user interfaces and user experience and I'm already looking forward to the next opportunity I have to see him present.

Needless to say, this has been a long week. Very fun with lots of opportunities to meet interesting people, sharpen my skills, and learn about new technologies and processes - but I wouldn't recommend making a habit of it.

If you were at JavaOne - especially if you attended one of my sessions - please take a moment to leave a comment. Same goes for you NFJS folks and GTUG members.

Next week's shaping up to be busy too and I expect I'll be posting something about the Big Texas Android BBQ about ten days from now.

Over. (That means it's your turn to talk - or in this case post a comment.)

Burk on Books - 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

A little less than a year ago I told you about "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know," a ground-breaking book O'Reilly had just published. I was very excited about the book for two reasons. The first is that the contents were contributed by experts from around the world under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means it's kind of an open source book. The second thing is that I wrote two of the 97 things chosen to be in the book.

If you read that post then you might share my feeling of deja-vu when I tell you that in a couple of weeks O'Reilly will publish a new "97 Things" book. This one is titled "97 Things Every Programmer Should Know" and once again I wrote two of the 97 things appearing in the book.

I'm hoping that programmers of all stripes will find the contents useful and interesting enough that it outsells the first book. If you'd like to take a sneak peek at the articles, they're available at the O'Reilly web site's 97 Things wiki.

If you like what you find there, please consider buying the book. No, I'm not suggesting you buy the book because I'm looking for a big royalty check. Remember the Creative Commons License I told you about? The only "payment" a contributing author gets is a free copy of the book. I want to boost sales for three reasons:

1. I think most developers will find it a valuable resource.
2. I think that good book sales will encourage O'Reilly to keep adding books to the series
3. I've got an idea for a 97 Things book I want to see in print.

If you do read the articles, please leave a comment here or send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for your time and attention,

Burk Hufnagel