Blogging Roller

I'm finally back home after a week in Austin, TX attending ApacheCon during the weekdays and exploring the city with Andi over the weekend. I always find ApacheCon an enjoyable and very productive conference. Here are some highlights from my point of view.

Getting to know the Struts, MyFaces and Shale teams. I got to spend some time with the Struts, Shale and MyFaces folks at the hackathon and at the various parties. It's really cool how well the teams get along and even contribute to each other's projects, despite the fact that they're working on competing Java web application frameworks.

Don Brown's talk. Don gave a very professional and persuasive talk on Struts 2.0. His coverage of themes and plugins and the new tags convinced me that I've got to give Struts 2.0 a closer look before I go any farther with JSF.

Stefano Mazzocchi's talk on "patterns in community building for open development projects" drawn from his 9 years of involvement at the ASF was wonderful and full of lots of useful tips and memorable analogies. I'd read about the "good ideas and bad code" pattern before (here and here) and it was interesting to hear Stefano explain it himself.

Clifford Stoll put on quite a show in the opening keynote. He frantically raced and hopped around the room firing lasers through beam splitters and Crayola Markers at monkeys and actually measured the speed of light and the speed of sound right there in the room with amazing accuacy -- lots of thought provoking fun. He also stole Craig McClannahan's coffee, drank it up and claimed it was chocolate milk. Unfortunately, I missed the Benetech keynote.

The Sun UnBOF/open source smack down between Tom Marble and Gier Magnusson got off to a shaky start, but once other folks joined in it started to work, at least for me. It wasn't really a smackdown and there wasn't really a concrete outcome, but it was definitely an interesting discussion of open source community and licensing issues.

Getting to know my Sun co-workers. I work remotely, so I really enjoy spending time with Sun folks and getting to know my co-workers despite the fact  that they're from different areas of Sun. This time around, I spent time with the open source and Java DB teams.