So the first day of No Fluff Just Stuff in Chicago is in the books. Although I enjoyed my day, I have to admit I was disappointed. Due to a speaker getting sick, there was a pretty large shake up in the lineup of talks and the order of them. Of the three talks I planned on going to today, I attended none. My original plans called for me attending two talks on Drools (JBoss’s rules engine for Java) and a talk by Scott Davis on Rapid Web Development with Grails and AJAX. Instead, I revisited Scott’s core Groovy talks and a talk by Alex Miller on Java Concurrency Idioms.

I realize that Chicago is the last stop on the NFJS tour, however since the “off season” is short, I figure this input can be valuable for those who may be going to some of the early sessions in the new season (or are deciding whether to go when NFJS comes to your area).

The first talk I went to was Scott Davis’s Groovy, The Blue Pill : Writing Next Generation Java Code in Groovy. If you have never been to see a talk given by Scott, you are doing yourself a disservice. He is a great speaker. Entertaining, knowledgeable and just fun to listen to. This talk was intended to be an introduction to the Groovy language for Java developers. In it, he provides an introduction to the Groovy language and walks thru some commonly done tasks for Java developers in Groovy (generating POJOs, unit tests, etc). This talk is great for those who have heard some buzz about Groovy, but aren’t sure what it is or if it’s worth investing any time learning.

The second talk I attended was the second part of the Scott Davis Groovy track: Groovy, The Red Pill : Metaprogramming, the Groovy Way to Blow a Buttoned-Down Java Developer’s Mind. In this talk, Scott starts to show the true power of Groovy. Topics include operator overriding, method pointers, closures and the “ExpandoooooooMetaClass!” (You’ll understand once you see his talk). If you don’t want to learn Groovy in some form or another after these two talks, nothing will ever convince you. Both excellent talks.

The third session I went to was given by Alex Miller. Alex is a Sr. Engineer for Terracotta and is well versed in concurrency in Java. This talk was very informative, however I think there was a bit higher threshold of entry for this session than I expected. I understand threading concepts, but most of his examples were not much more than a couple lines of code. I really needed more context to fully understand the topics he was trying to get across (I’m looking forward to playing with the samples once we get them).

The final talk for the day was the keynote by Neal Ford. Neal and Scott are my two favorite speakers at NFJS so I expected alot and he delivered. His talk, Keynote: Ancient Philosophers & Blowhard Jamborees, was entertaining, enlightening, at times scary but overall an excellent talk. The premise of this talk is that, as developers, we need to learn to learn from our history and apply it to new technologies and techniques as we go forward. To not is at our own peril.

Other quick notes about day 1:

• Swag: Laptop backpack, binder, lanyard, single user license for IntelliJ (I personally wish they were still doing T-shirts…I seem to have way more laptop bags than I do laptops and you can never have too many T-shirts)
• We will also get a 1GB flash drive with all the slides, however they aren’t in yet
• Food has been good so far. This hotel usually does well in that department

You can read more about the speakers and the No Fluff Just Stuff at http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com

Update:You can read my reviews of the conference and the sessions I attended here: day 2, day 3.