Last day of GOTO Aarhus 2013
The last day has no doubt been the most busy one for me. Not only were there a bunch of intersting talks, but I also had plans to do interviews with Douglas Crockford and Dan North. Two people I find extremely inspiring with Douglas having written THE book in Javascript and Dan one of my favorite speakers who always manages to teach me something in his talks all while having fun.
My day started out watching the keynote which was about becoming accomplished. Chad Fowler, who wrote the passionate programmer, did a good job at conveying ways to take charge of the great part of your life that is spent working. In his words a remarkable career equals a remarkable life with us spending about 50% of our life working.
Summing up the talk he recommended that you view your self as a market and then to through the cycle:
- Choosing a market
- Investing
- Execute
- Market
- Refresh
Doing this and finding out how you can squeeze in some learning time while being effective was the key points Chad made.
Shit happens it can’t all be ponys and rainbows
Right after the keynote I prepared for my interview with Douglas Crockford, but sadly it fell through in the end. I am not sure what went wrong, but I talked to him earlier and he was having a hard time keeping awake having slept badly. Too bad as it would have been fun to ask him a couple of questions.
Afterwards I went to Bodil Stokkes talk entited "programming, only better", which was about functional programming and why mutability and control elements are the emeny of our ability to reason about code. I had pretty high hopes for this talk, because I heard so many great things. While she is a great speaker and the talk was fun I still felt that it was too superficial. I deeply agree with her points, but I wanted something more, in depth and provoking. To be fair I was probably not the target audience, having already been doing functional programming, and I heard others who were very pleased with the talk. Also, you must admit she manages to stand out with an array of pictures with ponys and cats fitted in to her talk.
Before lunch I went to see the lightning talks on tooling with Ola Bini and Roy Osherove batteling on Emacs vs Vim. Currently I doubt I will ever take those up, but it was fun to look over the fence and see why they are passionate about these old school tools. Trisha Gee was also on showing her top 10 tips for intelliJ, but the demogods were not in her favor today. 20 minutes to do a lightning talk quickly disappear when your program freezes up. Bad luck because Trisha is a great speaker, but things happen even to the best.
Interviewing Dan North
Straight after lunch my interview with Dan North was up. Like most others I have a picture of Dan as always positive, fun and filled with energy - and he did not disappoint. Life is easy as an interviewer when you talk to someone as passionate as Dan. I was pleased that he seemed to enjoy the interview and he thought I did well with the questions. So now it is all in the hands of the good folks at newz.dk / filmz.dk - I can't wait to see the final result. Once again the highlight of the conference for me has been doing these interviews, so I am happy I get the chance and it was even more awesome having a real camera guy on board. This will warrent its own blogpost, so that will be comming up when the video is live.
Rounding off GOTO by indulging in language talks
Moving back in to the tracks I went to David Nolans talk on "ClojureScript Lisp's revenge". This was another talk I was expecting a lot from based on what I had heard, and David delivered. David quickly covered a bit of Lisp history and then went on to explain what people had been sceptic about reguarding ClojureScript. He gave us his thoughts on everything from compiletime and the size of "Hello world" to showing usage of sourcemaps running against production javascript. Finishing up he showed some of the latest advancements with core.async and typed clojure. Really cool stuff pushing me even more toward giving ClojureScript a go - sorry for the pun, but what can you do.
As the last talk of the conference I went for Ben Christensens talk about Functional Reactive Programming in java. It was a good end to the conference with a nice real world story of how they introduced reactive programming principles at Netflix. Ben did a great job at describing the move from a classical API to one based on RxJava which allowed them a much greater degree of flexibility in how they design and develop their backend systems.
Later this year I plan on following the Rx course on Coursera, so it was nice to see how much value they had gotten out of this approach, and seeing that Rx is gaining ground in a very wide range of programming languages
Best talks of the conference
The most significant themes for the conference has probably been around building distributed systems by breaking systems into smaller parts with messagebased communication as well as security. It is great to see these principles continue to advance, and security is something every developer should continuously look into. Personally I really liked the points Dan North made about scaling agile, the web security talks and the real world stories from developers at The Guardian and Netflix. These along with David Nolan showing the progress in ClojureScript is what I will remember the most.