The Goldfish Chronicles

So what were my general impressions of j1?

Queues. Queues suck, and being treated like sheep ruins a lot of the experience. That was such a shared complaint that it deserves to break the grammer and earn a Q not a q.

Queues for sessions, organized by Queue Managers with numbered signs and the feel of a street hawker, Queues for lunch,
Queues to have your picture taken with Duke, though fortunately these weren’t that long so there is hope for the human race yet.

So Queues suck. Not being able to get in a session once it has started sucks. And Standby Queues for those who
didn’t sign up suck.

They all suck for three reasons.

1. Being reduced to sheep is not fun. Fun flows, it never follows the framework. A two year old can tell you that.
2. Adhoc session networking does not happen. This breaks up any kind of community that was not pre-planned.
3. It increases the level the session needs to give value back to the attendee; they’ve had to go through more pain to get in there.

What stuns me are the number of people who queue for the lunch. The one time I picked a lunch up later it was higly unimpressive,
and yet the Queue goes on for miles. Amazingly the Queue for beer is often non-existent, it’s like ApacheCon in reverse

Being expected to put your name and number down on the session feedback also sucks. Why? Why? Why?

Having to scan your badge in to each session was a sign of things to come in our world. Not only were we sheep, we were
sheep with tags.

BOFs are bizarre. They just seem to be slightly less well attended sessions. The numbers work against them here - there are
only so many rooms, and so each BOF gets far more people than can manage an N to N conversation. Someone needs to think
laterally and come up with a better idea.

Obviously someone is trying; Sun had organized an Open Source UNBOF at a local bar - but this just seemed to be a ‘party’ and not any kind of subject focused discussion.

Parties are weird. It’s free beer for those in the know, those who have found a ticket, know someone or just walk in -
nothing that different from oscon/apachecon, but there are two groups in notable presence. Developers and business.
The developers are either big company people or open source. The business people are in suits Depending on the
location one or the other fits in more smoothly.

Best party? The Eclipse one. Nice big bar, open bar, lots of beer bar. Both suits and scruffs fit in and chat.
Crap part - BOFs are going on at the same time. C’est la vie.

I never get the parties and the free beer. Meaning I never understand it; I’m not adverse to a free beer I think there are legends
of ones that worked well, probably for smaller companies, and the big companies imitate this. It can work well - Chariot Solutions’
sponsorship of the Hackathon beer at San Diego in 05 has passed into legend for the arrival of a truck filled with bottles of very nice
quality beer and the subsequent angst on the hotel managers part.

The vendor section continues, as with many conferences in the last few years, to have a community section - the .org
pavillion. It’s still a work in progress in my opinion, I’ve yet to see one that clicks properly and does what they’re
looking for - replicates the hackathon. Not that the hackathon is there yet - we always need to do better at getting
contributors into it rather than just committers.

This year the .org pavillion - let’s be honest, the .org corner at the far side of the room, the cheap seats - is a
very odd setup. You don’t get a stable table - on a schedule you get moved around it seems. Not that I was there
much; as is typical the ASF haven’t organized themselves on it and the typical question is “We have a booth?” and the
answer is “Not really. The Derby guys are there sometimes at a Derby booth. “. My challenge to the Apache community
is to make these things work, to be prepared and show people the individuals we are rather than an empty table.

One of the Sun quotes of the conference has been “Blah blah blah….and here’s how you can use it in the Netbeans plugin”.
There’s a concerted push for Netbeans. Of course there’s also been the quote of “And this will be available in OpenJDK”.
Oddly (as someone pointed out), Glassfish is not mentioned. What does the success or failure of Glassfish imply for
OpenJDK? I hear OpenSolaris are going well, so hopefully OpenJDK will emulate them and not Glassfish.

Back onto the subject…. most of the above is negative.
I complain, it’s genetic from a thousand years of “Those Normans, they’re really messing things up”. What’s been good?

People. I met Tim O’Brien and Stephen Colebourne for the first time on Tuesday - two people I’ve known online for half a decade. I also met Gianugo Rabellino for the first time - Gianugo and I share a lot of similar beliefs around what he calls
open development so lunch at a mock greasy diner with him was a pleasure. The next day I met Adrian Sutton for the first
time. Adrian is a long time HttpClient committer (or as it’s known nowadays - HttpComponents Core). And of course
there was the chance to meet people I’ve met before - one of the nice bits about San Francisco seems to be that there
are a fair number of people who were just here for the day or even the evening and through random luck you could
bump into them.

The sessions that were interesting enough to deal with the crowds for. NASA Worldwind, core language JSRs. I’ll blog about those later.

I enjoyed cubicle time with Cenqua talking about Crucible. Currently it does the basics and does them well (as opposed to
the competition I’m aware of over the last few years who basically do the basics badly. Hopefully this will mature in the
next year into doing the basics well and exploring the more interesting directions. Cenqua’s was the one t-shirt that I picked up.

I also enjoyed hearing from Terracotta on how their product works. It’s a very nice hack that seems like it gives you a lot of power.

OpenLogic had a nice survey setup asking people which open source projects they were using. Mental note to try and find out what
the results were.

I went to four JSR core Java proposals.

• Closures. Scary as I mentioned earlier.
• Superpackages. Some of the details seem wrong, but generally feels good.
• Module system. Seems like a mess. Some ideas seem interesting, some seem lame.
• Date/time. Looking good - go Michael and Stephen.

Spring and Accenture announced a joint venture of theirs called Spring Batch. This sounded pretty damn cool and is
second on my list after WorldWind to look at. It’s a bit odd to hear that an open source group have been working on
something for a year and now are releasing it into the wild, but it’s a different model and it’s working for them.
Interface21 are still the most interesting company to watch out there in the open source world.

Back to complaints - one last thing that sucked…

Talks whose BOF had already happened by the time of the talk. So the poor speaker is having to apologize to the attendees while also trying to call for action.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 11:23 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.