Heli’s Blog

Day 2 on JAOO was the day of the great party (that’s why I am providing this post one day late) and great talks.
It all started by an inspiring keynote from Amazon’s Werner Vogels talking about Amazon’s platform - and how they got there. I read an interview with him in a recent ACM Queue or Communications, which was rather simular, but still a great talk.
Next on my list was the famous Bertrand Meyer talking about new concurrency concepts they implemented in their SCOOP system (which is based on the Eiffel runtime). Really interesting what kind of abstractions they used for those concepts.
After the lunch break I wanted to see Martin Fowler on Event Patterns, but unfortunately he had some problems with his back and could not come. His substitute was another ThoughtWorker, but he was not as good as I would have expected Martin Fowler to be.
A small intermezzo on the feedback that the attendees give after each talk: you just put a green, yellow or red paper card into a basket, and that’s it. So green means “Great talk!”, yellow means “T’was ok.” and red shows that there was something wrong with the talk.
So the Event Patterns talk was the first yellow for me.
Then there was Eric Evans’ two-hour talk about Domain Driven Design - really great talk (definitely green).
Next for me was a panel discussion on Abstractions for Concurrency with Bertrand Meyer, Denis Caromel, Satnam Singh and Joe Duffy. During the discussion I regreted not having seen the others’ talks: Singh for example had his about transactional memory - a really hot topic.
Day 2 ended with Alistair Cockburn (”with a silent ck” as he insisted once again) stating that “Methodologists are Blue-Green Algae and Methodologies are Swimsuits”. Brilliant talk again and fun to watch and listen to!
Did I say day 2 ended already? It did not, because this was just the time the great JAOO Party started. With all this free beer and good music I stayed longer than I should have.
On the other hand it couldn’t have been that bad, as I’m currently blogging in the hotel’s lobby and sipping another beer…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 19:35 and is filed under JAOO '06. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.