Cynical Monkey

Last month I attended a No Fluff Just Stuff Conference in my home state of Wisconsin. I wanted to say a small piece about it. After all, they did work hard at planting the “Blog about the Conference” Meme in my head.

The conference was great. I can’t say enough how much of a value it is to come and see these speakers in person. The speakers at this conference are top notch. I always walk away with a wow factor.
I have to say my personal favorite speaker is Stuart Halloway. Stuart always has the sessions that look a little deeper into the platform and bring the more enigmatic and powerful features of the Java Platform to the surface. That and he’s just a very charismatic guy.

So now my gripes.

• One of the conference’s main tenants is that doesn’t try to sell anything, I totally agree with that ideal, and so I say they should try selling conference a little less. I don’t think Jay Zimmerman(organizer) ever stopped praising up the conference to the attendees.
• Last year they branched out and did some lessons learned from other OO languages (Objective-C, Ruby). I was hoping for that breadth again this year. Ohh yeah, and what about mobile Java, Java for Games?
• They did cover Test Driven development. Out of 50 sessions nine were TDD related. It was so bad that some of the buzzword zombies started asking TDD questions during a Java Reflection session.
• Finally, I know some consulting groups in the area wanted to help sponsor the event, but were turned down because, “they don’t accept sponsors.” Except that our conference packets contained blatant advertisements for one consulting firm along with skill matrixes. I thought that was very hypocritical.

All in all besides my gripes it was an excellent conference that I would recommend to anyone. I am a little biased because it’s the only professional conference that I have ever attended. I am planning on going to OOPLSA this year and would be very interested in feedback from people who have attended this conference in the past.

Tags: conference, Java