No Fluff Just Stuff

This is the second year I've attended the No Fluff Just Stuff conference.

If you've never experienced the conference and you do any kind of software development that involves/runs on the Java VM (Java EE, Java SE, Groovy, Grails, etc) I strongly encourage you to go.

Even if you don't do any Java related software development but you work in Quality Assurance/Testing or Business Analyst/Requirements Development there are beneficial courses for you too. Some of these courses seem to be more geared towards this group but are attended mostly by developers. This seems to stress the notion of one software developer to change the world. One thing that comes from some of these sessions is the notion of collaboration. So instead of one person in one group (Software Development in my case) I'd like to encourage people from other groups (Quality Assurance/Testing or Business Analyst/Requirements Development) to attend also. This way we can change the world together!

The only thing I can say in any way negative about this conference is they seem to have a lot of things that are new and shiny new things like Groovy, Grails, Agile, and GWT. I work in a large behemoth of a company that is a slow moving, slow to adopt, vendor locked, internal standards driven. These things seem to be something that can be implemented more in small shops or don't have resistance to change (or regulations). Even this being said I still thing attending some of these are good for me because you can extrapolate some of the tips for your organization even if it really is an apples vs oranges environment.

I really enjoyed some of the concurrency, architecture and scaling, SOA, and Agile sessions. Last year I liked some of the continuous build, testing, and hacking sessions. I find some of the Facelets, JSF, Spring, Hibernate courses rather introductory but for some might be invaluable.

One thing (it's hard to name everything) I really like about the conference is that it is small enough you can ask questions and have a small group feel. A lot of the sessions are interactive and make good points.

You really get a lot of books recommendations from this conference some related more to software development philosophy rather than really technical books.

The keynote speech is greatly entertaining, funny, and informative.

This conference is also big on open source and you don't find any real vendor driven presentations.