PAX 2010

Just back from Project Automation Experience 2010.

Guess what? It was awesome!

Here’s my summary:

General:

The conference was combined with Rich Web Experience 2010, which probably, was the right thing to do for the first ever project automation seminar. It was announced 2 months ago, bringing 52 registrants (out of ~400 total for both events). Pretty impressive for such a short notice on such a narrow subject. The organization was fantastic, everything felt well-planned and well-orchestrated. It was my second NFJS conference, and like with the first one, they delivered!

Sessions:

The first speaker in the conference was the one and only Douglas Crockford in his notorious Quality talk. Top quality (pun intended) – funny, entertaining, and touching the right points. Bottom line – read The Mythical Man-Month and Literate Programming.

Yet another keynote was devoted to actually Project Automation. Hans Dockter laid down his vision on the topic, the idea being – we are entering very interesting times, better understanding of the needs combining with the right tools will enable us whole new level of project automation, way beyond what we are used to today.

Lots of fun and enriching talks, like Tim Berglund‘s Complexity Theory and Software Development or an experts panel, moderated by Ted Neward (who honestly tried to recall who I was and where did we met), and tons of useful and deep sessions and workshops, just to name a few: Fred‘s modularity and smart BRMs talks, Kohsuke’s updated Doing More with Hudson, Git, Sonar and Liquibase sessions from Matthew McCullough, Olivier Gaudin and Tim Berglund. The integration with Rich Web Experience gave the participans the opportunity to mix and match the sessions, and there was a lot of stuff to attend – HTML5, CSS3, Flash, iOS and Android development, Grails, Wicket and what’s not! 10 parallel sessions in any given time, now go choose one!

The sessions I gave:

First of all, it was my first speaking experience outside of Israel. I think I did well. At least the feedbacks say so The high speaker:attendee ratio produced small classes with live interaction, I loved it. As I suspected, 90 minutes are too long, looks like 60 minutes is my favorite format, but I managed to keep the audience awake

Here are my sessions:

Maven 2 Gradle how to move away from Maven2 to Gradle (using gradle2maven, maven-metadata plugin or even manually). Demo included converting the whole Artifactory project to Gradle.
Java Build Tools Jungle – overview the tons of Java build tools. Winners are (in that order): Gralde, Buildr, SBT.

By the way, Prezi rocks, as usual.

My next goal – speaking in a bigger seminar around spring 2011, probably on different topic, more relevant to my new job.