So I attend Javazone from Sept 11 till Sept 12. Javazone is a tech conference highly catered towards the Norwegian and Scandinavian region, but there were plenty of English sessions as well. I'm not a fan of Java, but I'm fan of technical stuff, so that's why I go.
Day 1
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The venue, Oslo Spektrum, that's that big irregular shape in the middle. Where it has been since I moved here, and probably before that as well.
The morning kicked off at 8:30am with a Norwegian band playing music. I was more concerned with keeping awake at this point. Early mornings ain't my cup of tea.
2:20pm's session on programming was like a history of programming languages and how today's functional programming languages solve some programming problems like state and mutations. "Programming, Only Better". At the end there was a Norwegian guy who asked questions in Norwegian while Bodil translated. Was this guy just too ashamed to speak English? I don't know. :)
5pm's session was on "Data, Visibility and Abstraction". At this point my brain was about to shut down. I had some chicken drumsticks after the session was over.
The last session of the day was at 6:20pm. I attended "Borrowing from Github's Culture for Fun and Profit". I actually liked this talk about Github's promoting working from anywhere, no leave day policy and other not mainstream accepted ideas. Mainstream is usually poor and at most, average.
Day 2
Well this is going to be short, as it was pretty much the same as the day before.
Sessions attended
Day 1
View Larger Map
The venue, Oslo Spektrum, that's that big irregular shape in the middle. Where it has been since I moved here, and probably before that as well.
The morning kicked off at 8:30am with a Norwegian band playing music. I was more concerned with keeping awake at this point. Early mornings ain't my cup of tea.
Yes the guy in the middle really is half naked and wearing a mask.
The first session of the day was at 9am, and I started off with Douglas Crockford's session on "Managing Asynchronicity in JavaScript with RQ". It was pretty cool, I like the syntax of RQ. He is a really good speaker, probably the best session I attended over the two days. I spoke with him in 2008 when I was still living in Australia in another conference.
Douglas Crockford.
Javazone works like this, every session is 60 minutes, with 20 minute breaks in-between. So after the break I spent 20 minutes running around taking photos, and well, eating food. I tried the cheese platter and bbq pork wrap, both were frankly awful by any kind of edible standard, thankfully the sushi was good which was a change. Usually it's the sushi that's awful. But anyway there's 6 different sessions going on at any one time, so you have to pick just one to attend. If possible usually I avoid pretty much all the Norwegian speakers, the American speakers or non Norwegians are much better speakers from my experience having attended all the sessions previously.
Sponsors area.
10:20am was the next session. "Livin on the edge: Netflix edge architecture". Did you know Netflix uses software that I create? And now here I was attending a session by them.
Adrian Cole.
11:40am's session was about avoiding creating gigantic blobs of mud posing as systems in the real world which people use. "Breaking the monolith: Towards a system-of-systems architecture".
His name is Stefan Tilkov. Harden the f*** up Stefan!! (only Australians will get this joke. ;))
The session at 1pm wasn't very interesting for me. Well I thought it was going to be but turned out, not really. It was called "Visualize your architecture and information". No pictures here.
2:20pm's session on programming was like a history of programming languages and how today's functional programming languages solve some programming problems like state and mutations. "Programming, Only Better". At the end there was a Norwegian guy who asked questions in Norwegian while Bodil translated. Was this guy just too ashamed to speak English? I don't know. :)
Bodil Stokke.
3:40pm's session by Finn.no, the only site that Norwegians know of in addition to vg.no, provided interesting insight into how mobile is taking over the desktop. Only a few years ago in 2010 1% of mobile users were using their site, today it's 41% and by years' end that's expected to be 50%. Anyway they create native mobile apps that interface a backend, it's extra work but it works in this case. "Why and how we do mobile native apps at Finn.no". Also talked about how the uptake of people updating their apps, well not everyone updates them, some people will never update them. After the session ended I had some coconut ice cream.
Alf Thomas Nilsen.
5pm's session was on "Data, Visibility and Abstraction". At this point my brain was about to shut down. I had some chicken drumsticks after the session was over.
Stuart Sierra.
The last session of the day was at 6:20pm. I attended "Borrowing from Github's Culture for Fun and Profit". I actually liked this talk about Github's promoting working from anywhere, no leave day policy and other not mainstream accepted ideas. Mainstream is usually poor and at most, average.
Matthew McCullough.
So after that I was pretty much done for the day. I had to go to trafikanten to exchange my faulty ruter cards and get a refund for my old paper tickets, finally got around to it after several months. Didn't get home till after 8pm, long day. I think I may have more sushi than the average person, but at least the sushi was well appreciated.
Well this is going to be short, as it was pretty much the same as the day before.
Sessions attended
- First, Kill All the Product Owners
- Information-Leading Architectures
- Design is a Process, not a Document
- Configuring large scale distributed systems
- Dart and Web components - Scalable, Structured Web Apps
- You probably don't know how the internet actually works
- 6 Years Later: One Line of Code That Changed the Web Forever
