JAOO 2009
I've been so up to my ears in work, I've had very little time to think, let alone post anything worth reading. After a maniacal trip to Boston last week for one day, I'm back on the road but this time for something more stimulating -- JAOO 2009 in Aarhus, Denmark.
I've arrived one day early to settle in and I'll be going to a tutorial tomorrow before the start of the conference. The fun part of picking which sessions to attend is upon me now and after some internal debating, it's looking more or less like this.
Sunday, Oct. 3
Release It (tutorial) -- Michael T. Nygard
Monday, Oct. 4
Scaling Up Agility: The Architected Agile Approach -- the legendary Barry Boehm
Software Architecture Paradigms and Styles -- Frank Buschmann
Extreme Java Productivity with Spring Roo and Spring 3.0 -- "the" Rod Johnson
Operations and Monitoring with Spring -- Eberhard Wolff, our favourite SpringSource consultant
Making use of Patterns -- Martin Fowler
xUnit Test Patterns - Refactoring Test Code to Improve ROI -- Gerard Meszaros
Energy-efficient Cloud Computing -- Urs Hölzle, my manager's old prof. at UCSB
Tuesday, Oct. 5
Agile Modeling and Documentation "Best" Practices -- Scott Ambler
REST - Theory vs Practice -- Subbu Allamaraju & Mike Amundsen
OSGi on the Server -- Martin Lippert
The War Against Latency -- Kirk Pepperdine
REST & Caching: Web Services, Accelerated -- Stefan Tilkov
Wednesday, Oct. 6
C++, Java and .NET - Lessons Learned from the Internet Age, and What it Means for the Cloud and Emerging Languages -- Cameron Purdy
Guiding Your Personal Life -- "Plan-Driven" or "Agile" -- another legend, Linda Rising
Engineering in Five Dimensions -- Michael T. Nygard
Distributed Computing the Google Way -- Gregor Hohpe
The Representation of Architectural Knowledge -- Philippe Kruchten
Sadly I'll be missing the last session of the last day. On the up side, Sabine is meeting me here on Monday night and we're heading to Paris on Wednesday for our first anniversary! Hope the weather improves...
VMWare to buy SpringSource
As if you haven't already heard in multiple places. If the result of hitting the SpringSource blog is a sign of things to come, then I'm not too stoked about this deal.
La mule dans l’action est arrivée!
Congrats David and John, all of your hard work has really paid off! It's true, I did skip to the "acknowledgments" page to make sure my name was there 
Proud to have been a very tiny part of this!
Premature optimization
We have a bit of a pandemic here: premature optimization. To tackle this problem, I'm promoting a new slogan, "prove it before you use it". In essence, be empirical. Don't add caching just because you think it's cool (CV-driven design) or because you think that maybe we need it here or there. Show me that you need it!
The fun part is that this has the prerequisite of monitoring and trending in both load test and production environments. This is something that is necessary anyways and just happens to have the lovely side-effect of being very valuable for business, operations and development!
I'm becoming quite fond of enforcing best practices through slogans 
