Stuff I've learned recently…

Late last night I returned home from the Groovy/Grails Experience (2GX) in Reston, VA.  I met many wonderful people and learned tons of new things, which I’m sure will spawn blog posts over the next few weeks.

Just to get started, though, I thought I’d mention a few random observations from the conference.

1. Buy Scott Davis’s Groovy Recipes book!
2. All of the major players I met from the Groovy and Grails projects (Dierk Koenig, Graeme Rocher, Jeff Brown, Jason Rudoph, and many others) were uniformly friendly and encouraging.  Everyone is so easy to talk to and so welcoming of others.  I’m more convinced than ever that Groovy and Grails are going to be huge in the marketplace.
3. Glen Smith, on the other hand, is certifiably insane.  And I mean that in the nicest possible way. 🙂  My biggest disappointment at the conference (other than bizarrely forgetting to bring my copy of DGG to get autographed) was that Glenn’s “UI Extreme Makeover” talk was so full I was unable to find a seat.  I had to settle for yet another talk by Scott Davis instead (the horror, the horror).
4. Apparently I’m not the only person having a long-term love affair with GinA.
5. Oh, and buy Groovy Recipes!  It’s now available!
6. Dierk Koenig gave a talk entitled “7 Groovy Usage Patterns for Java Projects.”  In retrospect, that may have been the most important talk I attended.  He showed all sorts of ways to apply Groovy to your projects, and gave each category a clever name.  My favorite was “house elf” scripts, defined as programs that “delegate the housework,” i.e., do the everyday background work for you.  I’m going to start collecting my own Groovy programs into his categories.  I really hope he finds a place to publish that presentation, or some article based on it.
7. Jason Rudolph’s Refactotum presentation (basically a how-to on ways to participate in open source projects) got off to a slow start, but finished very strong.  I’ve never actually contributed to an open source project, but now that I know how, I’m sure I’ll be doing so in the future.  I can write test cases at least, even when I’m otherwise busy.  I’m equally sure I’ll mention something about that here. 🙂
8. Don’t forget to buy Groovy Recipes!  Don’t let the fact that Scott included a quote from me in it dissuade you.

I see that I’ve left out almost everything.  I wish I could have attended twice as many talks.  I guess I’ll just have to go back next year, too.