Tuesday, October 04, 2011

7 Reasons to go to Øredev 2011

I’m am looking forward to Øredev 2011 more than I have looked forward to any of the previous ones. The reason for this is that Øredev has finally become a leading conference for dynamic programming.

Øredev has always been good in the enterprise sphere led by Java, .Net and mobile tracks, but it has been weaker in the area of dynamic programming languages. Last year was better than before, but this year is going to be great. Here are some speakers that you should not miss.

Yehuda Katz

Yehuda Katz was one of the driving forces behind the great Rails 3 refactoring, that made sure that Rails will remain the most productive web development environment for many years to come. Yehuda just released a new book, Rails 3 in Action, Its the first book about Rails 3.1, including the awesome Asset Pipeline, streaming, and reversible migrations.

Yehuda has also been involved with jQuery and written jQuery in Action.

He will be speaking about Rails and Sproutcore.

Felix Geisendörfer

Felix Geisendörfer is a core Node.js developer and he will of course be talking about Node. Node.js is a set of Javascript libraries that runs on top of the Google V8 virtual machine. What is interesting about Node, apart from being server-side Javascript is that it uses asynchronous programming as the default. This default makes Node extremely interesting for developing solutions involving multiple open connections, such as websockets, and for streaming video and audio. Node is definitely part of the future of the web. I have written extensively about it in the past.

Corey Haines

Cory Haines is a legend in the TDD community. He is also famous for his Code Retreats. He will give one workshop, Improving your TDD, and two presentations, Fast Ruby on Rails Tests and Come introduce yourself to the concepts and fundamental technique behind TDD

Ilya Grigorik

Ilya Grigorik is the founder of PostRank, that was recently acquired by Google. He is now working on Social Analytics at Google. At PostRank he used Ruby to perform analysis on very large amounts of data. While doing this he developed Goliath, a high-performance non-blocking web server using Ruby 1.9 and fibers. He will be talking about Goliath, Concurrency and Machine Learning

I can recommend that you follow Ilya on Twitter since his tweets has the highest signal-to-noise ratio I know of.

And, finally, make sure to check out Vim Golf, a really cool way to become a Vim wizard.

Trevor Burnham

Coffeescript is the new way to write Javascript without actually writing it :). Coffeescript is an elegant language, created by Jeremy Ashkenas, with features from Ruby and Python. The language is very pure and removes a lot of clutter. Coffeescript is compiled into good, efficient Javascript. Trevor Burnham has written a book, CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development, on the subject and he will be giving two presentations about it, CoffeeScript: Design Patterns for the New JavaScript and Transforming Data into Pixels: Visualization with Canvas and CoffeeScript

Charles Nutter

Charles Nutter is the man behind JRuby. He has also create another language called Mirah, which he will be talking about in Have you tried Mirah yet?.

While doing all this he has obviously learned a thing or two about the JVM and about bytecodes. Who could be better to teach us about the internals of the JVM. Charles will be giving another talk about this in What the JVM Does With your Bytecode when Nobody’s Looking.

Simon Peyton Jones

Even though this list of people is mostly about dynamic programming languages, it has to include Simon Peyton Jones.

Haskell is one of the most statically typed languages there is. It is, probably, also the most elegant programming language in the world. It is purely functional, has lazy evaluation, pattern matching, and currying by default. Even if you never use Haskell in a real-life project learning Haskell will be worth your while. If you want to get a good introduction to Haskell I can highly recommend Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton.

Summary

As you can see, this years Øredev is looking better than ever before and I have only included a select part of it in this post. Missing it should be considered professional misconduct!