Why did I go? Because it was free, and one of my friends was speaking, and one of my friends is a new developer and is job hunting. I like hearing about new things, or even about non-new technical things, when they are presented well.

The event is SVCC at the venue Evergreen Community College and it is all over a college campus. Talks were ~45 minutes, and the passing period between talks was 30 minutes, which was just right to get between buildings of the medium-small-size but slightly hilly college campus.

I did not make much of an effort to go to every talk, network, etc.

Wifi

SSID: EVC-Wifi No password. Free. Reasonably fast.

Parking

Parking at the venue was plentiful and not full (in the lot that we tried first). There were signs stating that parking was paid; we don’t know whether that was enforced. The fee was $3 so we paid it just in case.

Signage, Swag & Themes

There was excellent signage inside of the college, taped to the ground. There were no printed programs. There was a small (grocery-sized) black swag bag with advertising papers inside of it. There were free water bottles (disposable plastic) in tubs between each sponsor table at the little outdoor sponsor fair next to registration. There were ~12 sponsor booths. Microsoft appears to have a large but not overwhelming presence at this conference.

The demographics of this conference are - confusing. I think that these might be real programmers- the vast majority who do not usually go to conferences or meetups.

Long talk times can be nice.

Food

In the morning, there was free coffee near registration.

Lunch was free with registration (they handed you a raffle ticket, used as an entry ticket). It was a cheap sandwich, a bag of chips, and water. They were distributed in a roped off area outdoors near the registration desk. Distribution worked decently. We ate on the hot hillside in the shade of a tree.

Recordings

Only talks in the “Theater” room were recorded. they will be up on youtube

Speaker dinner

Saturday evening, bbq (some vegetarian options), held in the talk venue that was also a cafeteria. Pleasant. Badges were checked, but not aggressively.

Talks

10:45 Douglas Crockford - How to Manage Developers (Theater)

This session was excellent. He is a good presenter. The material was not new to me, but is was a good style and he used some memorable phrasings. I took some paper notes of particularly memorable quotes.

Lunch

  • I chatted for a while with the booth guy from Hurricane Electric. He was kind enough to talk with me for a good chunk of time about data centers, ipv6, and other topics. If you take their short online ipv6 course, they will ship you a (non-black, sadly) shirt. Fun times!
  • I visited the BT booth. I didn’t recognize the dev-evangelist guy there, but I asked a lot of questions, was not super impressed. But is a great place for good developers. They did not attend their booth on Sunday.

1:45 Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle (Theater)

  • TIL the name for Trie
  • Nice description of memoization (some people call this caching?)
  • two arrays, sorted and distinct, find elements in common.
  • Favorite: permutations of smallstring inside of b
  • Walkthrough sample problems
  • Generic advice
  • I coded through most of this talk. It was good background noise, with frequent inspiration for little code problems to solve. The code will be on github.

3:30 Clean Code (Cafeteria)

First my friend and I went to the Angular talk, where we got stickers and stuck around until it became clear that we both wanted to go looking for a different talk (about five minutes). We tried to go to the Ember talk but there was no good way into the room, since the door was directly behind the speaker. We peeked in and then continued on to the Clean Code session, which, when we got there, was very full of disinterested people. Many of them had their heads down on the cafeteria tables; some had earphones in. The general atmosphere was of a group of bored college students in lecture. The presentation was actually pretty good and covered the basic concepts of clean code for beginners.

Angular speaker’s site

We chatted briefly with the speaker Theo before the next talk, Dependency Injection.

5:00 Dependency Injection (cafeteria) by Theo

He asked for feedback, which I think is awesome.

“Who has written their own dependency injection container?”

I am not a fan of the part where he says “If you can do this in ten minutes, I will give you 50 dollars”

References Martin Fowler on dependency injection

Mentions Kozmic

Mentions this

Managed Extensibility Framework

10:45 Full Stack Scala (medium sized classroom)

The speaker says that he has commit rights on Spring “but I haven’t committed in a while” (Why do people always mention this first?) And wrote the book AspectJ in Action?

His company: Paya Labs

TIL that SoundScript exists. Related links: PDF of slides from a different presentation and this blog post

Also here is a cool thing that I saw on the internet during this talk… Data as Toxic Waste

Demo: non-released website (running on localhost) called learnRaga (a type of music). He gives a brief explanation of how webapps and static assets work.

Scalajs

Some dude is wearing a Drill shirt. What the heck does Drill even… be? “Industry’s First Schema-Free SQL Engine for Big Data”

Some technical difficulties have arisen with the slides. Computer has been restarted twice. The presenter’s son is in the audience and is helping debug the macbook.

The gender ratio in the attendees of this talk is about 6 F, 21 M (28%) Honestly that isn’t so bad; I think it’s about industr average. not that bad- not worse than average for industry, at least.

Scalajs-reaact

Facebook Flux “It’s more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.”

“This is modeled after Akka- whenvever there is a change, fire an event.”

react-native ScalaJS wrapper for react-native

His company wrote: An easy way to use JavaScript dependent MDL components with Scala.js React.

Mentions of: GraphQL, Stitch (by twitter- not OSS yet), Relay, Falcor (by netflix)

Cool explanation of what is Flux

1:15 Troll talk “Challenges of HyperScale HyperConvergence Big Data Cloud Automation”

Just to be clear; I do not endorse this presentation or this presenter. I think that the presentation is nonsense and that the presenter has very confused and inaccurate ideas about software.

The presenter mentioned that he is planning to give this talk again in the future at the CalExpo(?) in Santa Clara

Somewhere between nonsense and quiet madness

The slides were pixelated. Some of them were taken from other presentations. One of them was from an outdated RedHat marketing presentation. (You can tell that it was outdated because of the name of a renamed project)

My new theory is that this is an elaborate setup for a scam to sell nebulous scaling consulting services to some large company, based on having a backstory and having given talks.

Related links:

2:45 Design Patterns (Theater) by Jeremy Clark

Good presenting style. Starts with banjo playing and silly memes, which I enjoyed. I agree with most of what he describes.

He recommends Head First Design Patterns book over GoF for beginners. Fair. I’ve read a tiny bit of the HF book and it seems useful, if a little silly. I am not against silly.

I am not a fan of his approach to speaking to people who don’t understand his material. “Was that difficult? I hope not! This is about the easiest thing there is!” That gives the wrong impression of how to treat people who do not understand this material.

The speaker is also not super charitable to tech support. :/

Describing several design patterns, including chain of responsibility, Iterator, Facade, etc.

I feel like this is dumbed down a little much.

Other notes

Best talk according to a guy I met: Zen of Architecture

LFE - lisp flavored erlang

Quote from other attendee: “I didn’t study CS, so maybe I don’t know the right things to think, when it comes to java…”

People

  • Lady who has been a QA for 8 years at some company that starts with the letter T
  • Person whom I also ran into at a Python meetup at Yelp, and who now has my business card.
  • Cool dude from Hurricane Electric with whom I chatted. There is a quiz you can fill out if you want them to mail you a shirt
  • Dude from the Scala talk who does something with UI, and his backend team does Scala? Asked for and recieved my business card.