What I've Learned at UberConf - Part 3

So, I'm finally back home in Victoria, BC. I'm extremely tired, but it was great to have participated in ÜberConf 2011. Unfortunately, I only got to go to 3 of the 4 sessions on Friday as I had to leave early to catch my plane. Here's some of the highlights:

Jenkins: I'm already somewhat familiar with Jenkins, as my team is actively using it for our builds. Though this workshop was introductory, it was still good as it got us using GitHub, Sonar and Nexus along with Jenkins. I enjoy these types of sessions as I still often get a little trick or two to make my life easier.

Messaging and Concurrency with Spring: As I've been using Spring for years, I'm already quite familiar with many of its modules and paradigms. Still, with the vastness of their framework it's tough to know it all.

In this session, Bruce Snyder highlighted some custom Spring executors that are configurable and provide alternatives to the Java ExecutorService. He also went in depth into setting up Spring to work with JMS and ActiveMQ, which is actually fairly simple. I'd like to actually try out Spring Integration and see if it makes sense to use in one of my upcoming projects. Overall, this wasn't a world shattering session, but it was very informative.

Neo4j: Again with the NoSQL talks. I sat in on the first part of a workshop for Neo4j in order to get a fundamental understanding of what makes this Graph database different than other databases. Like MongoDB, this one is document based. The big difference is that instead of de-normalizing and nesting documents, they have relationships to each other.

In truth, this is much more of an actual relational database than traditional relational databases are. For this reason, Jim Webber suggested that people should start referring to traditional relational databases as "Square Databases". I'm inclined to agree and will actively start spreading this meme.

I think Neo4j houses a fascinating paradigm and can have some great applications. Being a Doctor Who fan, I loved the sample database we got running in the workshop, which was a historical storage of facts around the TV show.

Final Thoughts: Over all, I personally noticed three main themes at ÜberConf this year:

Continuous Delivery: With emphasis on better build tools (like Gradle), test automation tools (like Cucumber) and methodologies, there was a ton of focus on ensuring your software is always shippable.

Developing with a Team: Terrance Ryan gave a great keynote on Driving Technical Change. I noticed there were many workshops on working effectively within the context of your team, and how to best initiate forward progress on those teams.

NoSQL: There were a ton of talks addressing different tools in this space. With products like Cassandra, MongoDB, Solr and Neo4j available, there is a lot of different ways to address your data needs. The hard part is fully understanding the capabilities of these tools and when it is best to use one of them, or a traditional relational database. Database programming will change significantly over the next few years.

I'm also encouraged by what I observed at this conference, which helps confirm that I am currently working on a fantastic team. Many of the developers on my team are already pushing forward a ton of the ideas introduced at this conference. We've got guys pushing us toward Continuous Delivery and we're actively using many of the technologies and methods that were demonstrated this week.

As with any team, we still have a lot of room to grow, but we are clearly moving in the right direction. I'm very excited for the future at my company.