Well I just got home from a second day at No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS). Today wasn’t quite as exciting as yesterday, however I still had at least one great session. I went to four sessions total today (I didn’t go to any of the Birds of a Feather sessions this year). The four talks I went to today were Project Smells by Nathaniel Schutta, Exploring Terracotta by Alex Miller, Spring and JMS, Message Driven POJOs by Mark Richards and Ken Sipe’s Architecture and Scaling.

Project Smells is a talk about project culture. In it, Nathaniel talks about how things get manifested and how culture effects project success. I really liked Nathaniel as a speaker. He was entertaining and the talk overall was a good talk. Unfortunately he had to follow Neil Ford’s keynote last night and there were a ton of common themes between the two talks. At one point he actually pointed out that he had made the deck before Neil’s talk.

Alex Miller’s talk Exploring Terracotta was next on my docket. I have to say this talk was disappointing. Terracotta is Alex’s bread and butter. It’s what keeps a roof over his head, yet I felt like there were a lot of gaps or things he either didn’t have experience with or didn’t have the answer for on this topic. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect a speaker to know everything about the topic they are speaking on (after all, anyone is an expert until proven otherwise), however there was just too much missing given that this guy is one of the main guys working on the project itself. If you have no clue on what Terracotta is, this is a good talk. If you want to go to the talk with specific questions hoping to be answered, expect a 50/50 shot of success.

The afternoon for me began with Spring and JMS by Mark Richards. This is the first time I heard him speak and I have to admit, he did quite well, especially with Scott Davis as one of the audience members. His talk was informative and he had great examples. I went into this talk familiar with Spring and JMS. I was hoping to find out that something I hadn’t been able to figure out was possible. To my dismay, Mark only confirmed my findings (that you can’t do a true message driven POJO that returns something as well. It can only read from a queue). Overall this was an excellent talk and I recommend it for anyone interested in JMS and Spring.

Finally I went to Ken Sipe’s Architecture and Scaling talk. I had heard Ken speak last year about JMX and came away informed but not excited. After this talk, I felt neither. I can sum up the talk in the following sentence: “To architect a scalable solution, avoid I/O.”. That was the basis of the talk. I’m not going to pull out a soap box and debate that finding here, all I will say is that except for a bit more on the statistics gathering for proof of scalability, that previous sentence sums the rest of the talk.

Other quick notes about day 2:

• The flash drives were in. They are blue wristband flash drives (picture the rubber Livestrong wristbands with a flash drive attached to it). I’d probably be more likely to use it regularly if it was a key chain instead of a wristband. They seemed to have issues with the duplication process for them. I got one that couldn’t be read at all and one that some of the files were corrupt. I guess I’ll download the files and copy them onto the drive myself
• Food had a bit of a hiccup today. The main course for lunch was lasagna today. They ran out of meat lasagna prematurely. :( Oh well. I’m not a huge cheese person, but the vegetarian lasagna wasn’t that bad.
• The Birds of a Feather sessions this year were Languages on the JVM, Architecture and Agility.

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 1, day 3.