Attended the Great Indian Developer Summit the GIDS Edge and GIDS Tutorial Sessions In Bangalore. Attending this means going to IISC which is tucked slightly away from the hum drum of mainstream traffic and noise. Nice getaway for people needing to meet, talk and discuss on things that matter from Java , Software transactional memory, Geeks , Richard Feynman and Particle Physics and economic meltdown caused by geeks gone awry, spam mail being attributed to the inventors of web technology gurus having their roots in the hippie movement. You need to be a hippie in a sense to create something new be it learning something new or escape from your confinements. Most times we are accostomed to a set pattern of thinking on software, architecture, design, language semantics and never thought how it could be if things were different. Such conferences bring out the best from domains and enable one to think different and venture into new territories. We could all assume the status of neo hippies at such venues trying to rant , rave and break free from the technological “status quo” that kept us bounded to old ways. The fact that people still code in COBOL and are willing to know what is latest on that front as well apart from lamba expressions additions in Java 8 which should not be seen as far behind functional languages such as scala, groovy shows how the old and the new co-exist along with the very latest. Java is slowing catching up with the functional languages. Nice summary at the end of a great talk from Venkat that the best way to control the future would be to create it as Peter Drecker once said.Neal took us into the realm of Physics and all things geeky and how it criss crosses our everyday life.
Met a lot of speakers worth their salt in flesh and blood having seen or heard their presentations on youtube or other having dropped by their blogs and found enlightenment when needed.
Caught up with some friends and ex colleagues during lunch and shared stories technology and otherwise. Post lunch it was a great and live wire talk by Scott Davis on the future of video and how it can replace all our old devices of entertainment and how soon entertainment will change from being pushed from the cables to on demand where we decide what we see, how we see and how much of it we will see. Nice to know that all major vendors are going the HTML 5 way having seen too many issues with vendor proprietary standards. Scott Davis did look like a hippie with the long flowing hair or rather the guru ( of any age ) who cleared the air on video standards and the inside story of the H.264 standard which end users are not made to suffer when they watch videos and only the browser vendors having to pay for it. His presentation style made sure that the post lunch sleep bug was pushed aside and made for a captivating talk and commanded full attention.
Next was a presentation by Marty Hall on the future of Java. He summarized the Java journey and his own journey from a LISP developer to a Java developer. There was a Gosling v/s Ellison discussion on how the creator moved away to other things and the owner choosing to keep Java still open and mostly as it was , Ellison not having earned the bad boy tag from the geeks and nerds who are Java loyalists. Disheartening to know that Apache is not strongly associated with Java anymore and that they traded ways. Many great things were part of the Apache flagship and saw the light of the day thanks to the strong communities that were part of it. The underlying principle is if you want any technological innovation succeed then get the developer community involved and once you have them on your side you cannot go wrong. Besides this there are no hard and fast rules on why some fads catch up and some do not as it the case with movies. Some become block busters and some just are forgotten by the next friday.
What came out strongly was that the changing face of standards and set ways of doing things. Concurrency has itself changed on how it was being done from early Java to how it will be done in Java 8. Having to attend such conferences bring in different perspectives and helps you to rethink on issues and being introduced to the moving targets in this case technology itself. More on how software development needs to cater to agile means of development by means of continuous development and continuous integration and continuous development. All things continuous meaning whatever you pushed aside as the dirty work now having to do it almost routinely. It is eating a frog every release unless of course you relish them. This was Neal Ford on the Continuous Integration and how it is soon becoming part of all well executed projects.
Towards evening attended the GBG (Google Business Group) Google meetup on building an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bangalore and Google doing its best to get people thinking on those lines and helping them with the mindset and the needed resources and the money by bringing the people with money and the idea guys together to create the next BIG startup out of Bangalore.
Truly this was our own ALL STUFF NO FLUFF fair at Bangalore. And apart from learning many things new it was this word from Neal ( MEME Wrangler at Thoughtworks) that we should look for ways and means of designing software in an non COMPLECTED way and prefer straight strands always.
End of the post , on my way to other things UN COMPLECTING if there is a word like that meaning towards a straight path….