This is the first time I ever attended a company-paid conference... There was a full day workshop that cost $300 alone. It was incredibly costly at more than $2500. Plus hotel of gosh $155 a night if you have the discount. ($200+ if you don't). You will also need car rental to get from the airport to the conference... The total cost is a LOT of $. Unless you are extremely rich you will not want to pay for such education/vacation on your own.
Employers! You really should pay your people x-$4000 and then say you give them $4000 for training expense. The conference is really an employee empowerment... and your employees may probably use less than that each year. You get to hear experts share their knowledge... however, for an hour-and-a-half sessions it is hard to go deep. There were many sessions going on at the same time, so you must choose 1 of many in each time slot.
This means: even if you pay a lot of $, you will not get very deep understanding unless you actually go deeper on your own. And sometimes it is just a lot easier if you get to hear a human talk about things than go through things on your own.
There were some lecturers that I really like. Like going back to school with your favorite professor. The guy gives notes as he goes and put on a shared google doc. The guy even used complex numbers as test case example and then used eiπ = -1 as test case and that immediately strikes a chord with me.
There were a couple sessions I did't like: there was a mean looking guy who don't explain wacky acronyms and the demo shown was a video. The guy didn't even type commands on the keyboard. If you are mean looking I don't care really what you have to say.
There was one guy who can draw a lot of laughter but I don't even know what's so funny.. and I need some slides so I can follow along especially if you don't speak perfect English. It is not radio you know. I want something to look at. I do not understand why that guy get high marks.
Oh there was a session on hardware (Arduino and Raspeberry Pi) and all you show me is a picture of the various ports that I can easily look up myself and show me some blinking lightbulbs? and code already all typed up and running. Didn't get much out of that. People pay thousands I expected a bit more. Little computers... can I make it to play ppt file all day attached to a monitor? Can I attach some wheels and make a toy RC car... Can I turn it to a MAME machine? (apparently somebody have done this one)
I also get something out of what tools people use. I see maybe 80% Mac and 20% PC. and I only saw a couple Windows 8 (I can easily tell by their Start button or lack thereof). I did not see one Surface (that thing is supposed to replace your laptop, yeah right). Many tools (the installations) run only on Mac/Linux! Seems like java developers prefer the Mac. People like SubLime as editor on the Mac... This is the only editor that I know that let you choose files on left pane and show you text on right plane.
Notable sessions I went to:
- Spring workshop - Spring got easier! That Spring Tools Suite is worth checking out if you do Spring for a living. Look you can just do new->Controller and things will be cranked out for you and it is even easier to do this in Groovy.
- Groovy - every java developer should take a good look at this. It makes java lot simpler and even fun.
- Gradle - making builds... makefiles, then ant, maven, now people do gradle... It is interesting to see people got fed up with one thing will then create another.
- Angular - it seems easy to create a one-page ng-app! But I am a bit nervous so many things behind the scene. I want to see the onclick events and stuff but they are hidden from me.
- Go - no, not the traditional oh-my-deep-and-difficult board game, the google programming language. This thing has no classes! But you can still do interfaces and stuff and its strength in concurrency. Go whacked the while loop and do-while loop and go with for-loop only.
Basically anything created by Google I have some interested in, ok perhaps except the glasses. I wish I have time to listen to Scala. The designers of Java and Groovy all endorsed Scala! The groovy creator guy even says he would have never created Groovy if seen Scala.
Look, nowadays you need to embrace functional programming and closures. It used to be totally separate paradigm from OOP. Semicolons after each statement are now so passé.
This clojure thing (didn't attend the talks) is like completely LISP! I am glad I remember my LISP things: car, cdr, cons... and of course lambda.
Long live Pascal! Go and Scala like Pascal-style type on the back, unlike C/C++/Java. People do miss writeln in Pascal with println.
The conference makes learning a bit easier because there is a live human being telling you things that you can find on the web... though they have only able to scratch the surface of each topic. Nothing replaces you hands-on working with things for some time.
The conference is like 95% male and 5% female. This is the first time I see long line in the men's room and no line in the ladies room. All presenters use Mac computers.
This is a programmer's vacation. I enjoyed this conference.
No comments:
Post a Comment