The Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference was great!!! I had a chance to meet some of the technical talent here in West Michigan (and beyond), and learn a lot of new and interesting things regarding technology and Project Management.
One of the greatest parts of the conference was listening to Bob Martin speak. I have never heard him speak before, and he is great. He is very passionate about software development. I took away many of nuggets of wisdom from his talk titled Clean Code, and I will plan to share some of them in future posts.
Overall, I think that my talk, Classical vs. Mockist Test Driven Development was well received. I was definitely nervous, especially since I had to follow Bob Martin's Clean Code talk. In the end, however, it is very natural to talk about a topic that you enjoy - in this case Test Driven Development.
I also attended the first day of tutorials offered at the event. I spent the day with Chad Fowler, learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I was really impressed with what is capable with Ruby on Rails. To be able to whip out web applications so fast with such little effort, is definitely enticing. If you are a Java Developer, I highly recommend you taking the time to look at this language. I believe that in the future, dynamic languages on the JVM is going to become more and more popular, and it will be important to know these concepts in the future.
Standing ovation to all of the people who dedicated so much time to the GLSEC making this event the success that it was. I am definitely looking forward to it next year.
