Another year, another No Fluff Just Stuff is in the books. As I have said previously, this is my third year going and just as previous years, NFJS did not disappoint. I went into today with no idea what I was going to go to except for Ken Sipe’s Hacking - The Dark Arts talk. I ended up picking Coaching and Leading Agile Projects by David Hussman, and two by Andrew Glover: Tactical Continuous Integration with Hudson and Easy BDD with Groovy. All were top notch.

The first talk, Coaching and Leading Agile Projects by David Hussman was about Agile coaching. I went to a number of David’s talks last year and enjoyed them immensely and this one was no different. He has a depth of knowledge in the Agile management space that is second to none and his laid back demeanor leaves for a relaxed and open talk. If you are interested in Agile at all, I strongly recommend attending his talks.

Next I went to Andrew Glover’s Tactical Continuous Integration with Hudson. My current project just recently implemented CruiseControl and I used CC on my last project, however knowing that CC has some limitations and frankly is pretty crude overall, I was curious. Hudson is what CC was meant to be after seeing Andrew’s talk. From build pipelines to trending, it has it all. I was very impressed. Unfortunately, since it’s alot newer that CC, not all plugins are fully featured yet. In my case, we use Rational CearCase UCM and the plugin for that doesn’t have everything we need yet. So no switching…yet.

The expert panel discussion was held after lunch a good Mexican lunch. It started out with Jay doing some word associations with to get the conversation going which felt like it went too long IMHO. Once the floor opened up, there actually was a very good discussion on what will happen when software will be held to the same standards as things like cars and medicine. For example, if a car blue screened everytime you honked the horn and changed the radio while on the express way, there would be a ton of accidents, people would sue and things would change. However, we accept similarly obscure faults of software without much second thought. Once lawyers get involved and software is held to a higher standard things will change (or so the panel seemed to agree).

The afternoon for me continued with Andrew’s talk on Behavior Driven Development in Groovy. Once again, I enjoyed Andrew’s talk immensely. I will be honest, I probably won’t switch to using easyb anytime soon (it felt too much like just well documented JUnit tests instead of anything really new IMHO). Essentially easyb is a DSL for test driven development that combines a formal documentation syntax with testing code. I will say I came away well informed and entertained.

Finally I attended Ken Sipe’s Hacking - The Dark Arts talk. For what it was, it was a good talk. Ken did an excellent job covering cross site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection. However, I personally would like to see this stretched into a track instead of a single talk. Not much outside of what can already be found on OWASP and using WebGoat was covered. This would be a really good track if in talk a he covered vulnerabilities and exploits and in talk b he covered security in the enterprise with topics like security audits, etc. Since most people would get fired for just starting to hack their system, I think covering how to introduce these topics into an enterprise would be a valuable topic.

Overall, this year’s NFJS was an excellent experience. I have a deck that I will be putting out in the coming weeks that I used to sell NFJS to my managers. I firmly believe that there isn’t another conference where you can spend so little and come back with so much you can use literally on the Monday after. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Update:You can read my reviews of the conference and the sessions I attended here: day 1 and day 2.