JAOO is an impressive conference, with a good (and no doubt expensive) list of international speakers. I highly recommend it, as a "bring the world to you" local conference (next year will be Brisbane and Melbourne I hear) - although the full price is quite an ask in this day and age....
Well my thoughts on interesting sessions I went to:
How to build an iPhone app in 45 Mins (Patrick Linksey):
Lots of fun - probably most popular session - a bit of an Objective C intro to those that didn't know it. I was quite enjoying the nuances of it until I realised the bits that were entertaining me was the manual management - I guess after almost 10 years of not worrying about it you forget the bad...
Speeding Ducks (Avi Bryant):
Great talk on VM performance - the sydney one turned into a bit of discussion/hand wringing on who would pay for the development of advanced VMs for Ruby... interesting...
Consistency, Storage, and Reliability in the Cloud (Jonas S Karlsson):
Jonas introduced Google's Megastore, which introduces some interesting bits from RDBMS into googles big table storage system - including transactions etc... (its not "ACID" but it does allow things to scale in the way that google needs them to).
Deception and Estimation: How We Fool Ourselves (Linda Rising):
This was more a shallow dive into psychology, why we willfully deceive ourselves, and why its probably a good thing... very interesting, and actually a lot of fun to listen to (I got the impression people felt relieved and uplifted by it).
Of course Josh Blocks puzzlers was fun: note to self, don't ever ever use inheritance again if you can at all help it (all the questions are secret as he is doing the presentation I think at JavaOne).
Writing Large Applications in JavaScript (Douglas Crockford):
Great talk on javascript in general, the the hilarious way it inserts semicolons (a dirty hack even by my low standards !).
A picture from the stunning conference centre in Sydney:
Jaoo Michael Neale 09
