A couple of weeks ago 700 geeky Swedes (and a handful of other Scandinavian people) descended on Gotheburg to attend Scandanvian Deveopers Conference. It was the first year that I went along and enjoyed the experience of this conference.

The two days had plenty of options – with eleven (yes eleven!) parallel tracks including language specific ones (java, .net), mobile, upcoming things, agile methods, web, SOA, etc. Something for everyone for the most part. This invariably brought a whole collection of interesting speakers from plenty of different walks of life. I met plenty of new people and reconnected with many others.

My key takeaways
Just like many of my colleagues, I’m interested in the “what could” be for functional programming. I have my own thoughts on its applicability, relevance and maintainability to my day to day work, however I made myself attend several sessions to see what it was. Neal Ford (great presenter as usual) did a great introductory session to the mindset behind functional programming. I’m glad to see that my studies in this at university meant a lot of it I already understood (first class functions, recursion, etc). I understood, though can’t extrapolate the strength of closures (at least the way that Neal was describing them), and the real world application of currying.

I enjoyed listening to Douglas Crockford talk about the new changes in the upcoming update to the Javascript language. I found him honestly refreshing – talking about which features to avoid (and why) and which things have been added to make users’ lives much easier and still maintain backward compatability. I can’t say that I learned a lot that I could immediately apply but had to laugh at pictures like this:

I also really enjoyed Matthew McCullough’s talk on git that was both insightful and entertaining on the internals, practicals and plenty of live demonstrations using the tool. As a fairly new user to the tool, I learned quite a bit and know more about what I don’t know and can work to fill that gap.

I have to admit the keynotes didn’t really get me thinking any differently, but I think that’s more of a function of having followed Alistair Cockburn’s thoughts for some time and having worked with and understanding change (the topic that Henrik Kniberg talked about).