TSSJS: The rest of the sad story
The 2nd day of TSSJS was, frankly, abysmal. Other that jiramike’s talk about pragmatic clustering (which despite its promise, mostly involved recommending orasol), there was absolutely nothing that was interesting enough to even go in and bile. The content was fairly dire, why would anyone think that ‘better javascript with prototype’ is something worthy of discussion in this day and age?
Rod gave yet another Spring 2.0 talk. Exactly how many of these do we need anyway? As if a Spring 2.0 generic rodtalk wasn’t good enough, it’s a repeat too from the day before. Is there anyone out there who still gets excited about a Spring 2.0 talk? I for one was much happier staring blankly into space for the duration, it was far more satisfying and educational.
Cameron gave the same tired old clustering grid scaling productpitchbutatasuitabelytangentialangle talk, which I’m sure was very pleasant.
It’s worth at this point pausing to consider the utter crapulence of the panels at this TSSJS. The ESB panel for example was manned by, you’ll never believe it, ALL ESB VENDORS! Gosh, I wonder what they had to say. At a wild wild guess, I suspect they all think everyone should use an ESB. The OSS panel was similarly staffed with people from companies who are busy seeing how rich they can get from OSS, rather than any consumers of OSS or someone without a vested interest.
The Alfrecso guy on the OSS panel was in particular an impressive douchebag. He merrily proclaimed that all software will be either services or OSS. Amazingly, not one other person on the panel called him out on it. Needless to say, this proclamation was pretty upsetting to the majority of people there, who were, on the whole, not living off of OSS or software-as-a-service. Still, not surprising considering the guy ran Documentum, one of the disasters that befell this industry that we still haven’t quite recovered from.
The third day’s contents were marginally better, though I got roped into being on some random panel where we all got to feel important and pontificate pointlessly about more or less random shit.
Overall, the best part as usual was the socializing. It’s a shame that that sometimes entails nipples being tweaked and genitalia reached for(grrr, you know who you are), but one can’t let the small stuff like that get in the way of a generally good time. The best part by far of the whole event was venturing to downtown Vegas and kickin’ it oldschool.
Conference wise, it would have been nice if a miniscule amount of thought were put into the scheduling and selection of content. For example, the last sessions on Friday were all in the same sort of field, so if you wanted to go to one of those, chances are you’d also have been interested in the others. Yet the powers that be ensured you couldn’t do so. The whole thing had far more of a corporate than community feel, which is a terrible shame.
Trotting out the usual suspects to do their repeat talks from last year is tired and tedious, it’d be nice if the brand name speakers did a little more than just show up and recite a talk they’ve done 50 times so far. So please, no more Spring 2.0 talks, though I suspect the opensource track gurus at JavaOne probably have that exact same talk scheduled, bless their dirty little socks.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
First.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Secondirst.
And Alfresco shows some promise… Too bad the average Java shop doesn’t trust anything they don’t bleed anally as payment for.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Hani,
You know I love your blog, but it’s hard to hear you complain about a conference that you’re supposed to be helping with - from the content side.
If you want to do something different, or change the content to be more to your liking (and the attendee interest) you should do something about it.
I mean, you are one of the folks on the “TSSJS Conference Board” - http://javasymposium.techtarget.com/lasvegas/advisoryboard.html
Just my 2 cents.
Keep ranting… /LC
March 26th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
“It’d be nice if the brand name speakers did a little more than just show up and recite a talk they’ve done 50 times”
If I haven’t heard it, it’s new to me.
March 26th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Yeah, second day wasn’t good at all. I looked at the session list and went to the Grand Canyon. 5 hour drive. Well worth it. They really need to build a fence around some of the tourists stops, people die all the time.
Anybody else go to Chet Haase’s Filthy Rich Clients session, I felt sad for the guy. He was almost apologizing for being there.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I looked at the presentation for the Filthy Rich Clients session. Lots of code examples which I was a little surprised about, I thought it would be more of a comparison of Swing, SWT etc.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
> They really need to build a fence around some of the tourists stops,
> people die all the time.
Eh. That’s Darwin at work right there.
March 26th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Eric Farmer: Which was clearly not what was in the abstract :)
March 26th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Zarar, you must’ve gone to the southern rim, the western one is only 90 minutes away, not as nice but they are building that glass walkway. Perfect place to shit your pants.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061215-skywalk.html
March 27th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Hani,
You used to be funny, but as time goes on you sound more and more like a grumpy old man.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:04 am
Joe,
I think you are being hugely unfair here. What Hanni does is very, very clearly humor.
at least that’s what he says it is in http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/03/27/On-Aggression#c1175039239.618860
March 28th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Ooops, soory fate, mangled your name, it’s Hani, of course. D’oh, I need coffee. :)
March 29th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Interesting how you always seem to gravitate to the “boring, worthless” talks. Is that a sign of your personality/interests/intelligence/capabilities? ;)
March 31st, 2007 at 2:28 am
I really enjoy your blog. You crack me up. I wish I had half the talent you have with words. Since I don’t, I thought I’d suggest a couple of topics that I’d like to rant about, but I
know you could rant so much better. First, and arguably the most frustrating, is the community of WS standards-making geniuses who have created the unbelievably overally
complicated, confusing, redundant, and bloated specifications included WS-Addressing (and WSDL binding), WSDL 1 and 2, WS-Policy, OASIS Security crap,
BPEL (the perfect example of an overly complex spec.), and so forth. Another topic you already touched on is Spring/Hibernate. I just don’t get it. What may have started as some good ideas, seems to
like another framework that has become bloated, outdated and duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists. This brings me to my last suggested topic, which is basically a superset of
the others: complexity. Java APIs, SOA-based architectures (ESB/JBI), WS-Standards all have one thing in cmmon - they have grown woefully complex. I don’t have a problem with complexity
by itself, but complexity from redundancy and complexity for differentiation/marketing sake drives me crazy. I’m interested to hear what you think if you get some time.