Sun Midwest Java Technology Day

Sun had their Midwest Java Technology Day on Tuesday to tout a number of the new technologies they are introducing to the market. I'm excited the Sun has an interest in promoting dynamic languages in the JVM and the keynote by Tim Bray was no exception. He talked about how right now is a perfect time to start you own company. The barriers to entry are the lowest they have ever been in terms of open source software and if you have an idea and are willing to do hard work, you can do it. It was very inspirational for an entrepreneur myself. In not so many words he said, "Leave your boring day job and work in technologies that interest you!". Great advice. I've been in business for myself for over a year now and have absolutely loved it. He also had a number of slides discussing the great advantages of using a Ruby on Rails for your next web application (or start up).

The remainder of the conference was pretty typical with EJB 3.0, Glassfish and the new features in JDK7. I does seem that Sun is getting the message of a more light and agile stack in the frameworks and creating web services in NetBeans running Glassfish is pretty neat. However, the fact that the head technology evangelist at Sun is talking Ruby to CEO's at companies makes me feel good that this Ruby thing might be more than just a fad. I know I've found some great productivity gains when working in Rails and once the managers see the benifits in terms of cost, the services Localtone Interactive provides will be very much in need.

Open Source Project - Walk The Walk

While at the No Fluff Just Stuff Conference, Justin Gehtland had an excellent talk on JRuby and Open Source. He went though some of the really cool features of JRuby and for someone like me know has been doing Java for 10+ years and would like to leverage some of the libraries I know in Java from Ruby, JRuby is very exciting.

What I also found excellent about Justin's talk was that he went though how one contributes to an open source project. From checking out the code from SVN, to using a bug tracking tool, to submitting a patch. He used the JRuby project as an example, but really the process is the same with others. He also at the end encouraged people to put aside say, 4 hours a week to work on an Open source project. At his company, Friday afternoons from 12-4 are considered "open source time" where everyone in the company spends their time working on open source.

What a great idea! I use open source software everyday, from Open Office, to Firefox, to Ruby on Rails to countless number of libraries in my projects. Why not create this rule in my company? Why not create something similar in your company? I've already found a project that I'm going to download and look at working on. I challenge you to do the same. Find a project that you find interesting and contact the owner and see how you can help. It doesn't have to be code. Documentation, testing and even at times, donations of money can go a long way to improving a project. Sourceforge and Codehaus are two places that host some great open source projects. Have fun!

No Fluff, Just Stuff

I attended the No Fluff Just Stuff conference this past weekend in Bloomington, MN. I'm not sure if the conference itself was sold out, but it seemed to be very well attended. It started on Friday at noon and concluded on Sunday evening around 6:00. I had a great time seeing some familiar faces and catching up with a few people that I hadn't seen in a number of years. A few things that I took away from the conference.

• Dynamic languages are hot and are only going to get hotter. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Grails are going to continue to grow in popularity, even for larger organizations. This was a great reality check for me. Working in Rails and Grails is where I have been focusing my business efforts for this past year. It's good to see that I am somewhat ahead of the curve on thee awesome technologies.

• There were a great number of people who are managers at this conference - read: the people who make the decisions on the software to use. The fact that there were so many sessions on groovy and grails and the people that actually make the decisions on the software technology to use in their organization were there and were listening, means that we will most likely see tangible projects and needs from business asking for people with Groovy and Grails skills.
  

Overall I'd recommend checking out the No Fluff Just Stuff Conference when it comes to your town. It usually comes through Minneapolis every 6 months or so. While I wouldn't go every time it comes through, probably one a year to 18 months is worth the cost for admission.