We’re not much for fanfare here at ZeroTurnaround, but this is our most ambitious report that we’ve ever created. This year, over 1100 Java developers shared their take on the developer life with us.

This report about Java Developer Productivity in 2012 is broken down into 4 parts; Tools & Technology Usage, Timesheet (How developers spend their time), Efficiency and Stress.

It is interesting to read a report that investigates ‘what makes developers tick’ as well as the Tools & Technologies being used. This report highlights some interesting trends and insights in the Java Development area.

If you work in a Java Development environment this report should make for interesting reading. Is the report representative of your experiences during the past year or contradictory?
See on zeroturnaround.com

Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean, and other variations on continuous improvement can be hazardous to your organization’s health. While it may be heresy to say this, recent evidence from Japan and elsewhere suggests that it’s time to question these methods.

This interesting insight into Continuous Improvement practices whilst applying some broad interpretations (sometimes incorrectly it seems), eventually comes to what I think is the right conclusion. Continuous Improvement requires companies to consider people, context and culture not just process.

The healthy and lively discussions in the comments add more substance to this post, some question the validity of  statements in the post (some even go so far as to attack their validity), whilst others discuss the innovative traits of propserous Continuous Improvement environments touched on in the article.

If you practice Continuous Improvment or are considering it, reading this article and digesting some of the useful items in the comments – you may save yourself some pain and gain some real benefits.
See on blogs.hbr.org

The Agile Revolution podcast is a sleek presentation of current Agile news and events presented by 3 highly experienced Agile coaches.

As well as discussing the latest articles, statements, tweets pertaining to all matters Agile, the show features guest interviews and plenty of entertaining banter amongst the presenters.

Always informative, thought provoking and entertaining. If you need to feel the pulse of Agile in Australia and beyond this is a highly recommended podcast.

Go along to http://theagilerevolution.com and join the revolution.
See on www.theagilerevolution.com

SonarSource recently released Sonar 3.0. Sonar provides feedback on a number of code quality metrics and is an invaluable tool in any Continuous Integration environment.

Whilst you can see similar metrics in build servers such as Jenkins/Hudson, Sonar provides a more robust trending environment for such information. Personally I limit the information on the build server to no more than is necessary to fix build issues/highlight problems at build time. Sonar is used as my real code quality management tool.

Sonar can help manage technical debt for your teams leading to reductions in application mantenance costs. Understanding and managing this technical debt assists in the production of quality deliverables and should be on the agenda of all delivery teams.

Check out the latest version of Sonar 3.0 at the new website http://www.sonarsource.com
See on www.sonarsource.com

Craig Smith and Adrian Smith have got together and provided a useful list of 8 tips to becoming a more effective Agile Coach.

Having had the pleasure of working in the same team as these experienced practitioners, I know first hand how well these guys know their craft. I learned a lot from working with these highly respected coaches.

They provide each tips below a slide in this short blog posting, including a slide featuring the obligatory A-Team slide (I assume Craig produced the slides). Believe me when these guys talk you should listen.

The slides are merely a warm up for a workshop the guys will be running at Agile Australia 2012. Unfortunately I won’t be there this year, but if you are going I would highly recommend getting in to their workshop – I am sure you will walk away the wiser for it.
See on craigsmith.id.au

No Bull: After twelve agile years has the world of software development really changed? Read a personal commentary from Simon Baker, cofounder of Energized Work and 2009 recipient of the Agile Alliance Gordon Pask Award.

This paper outlines the challenges faced by Agile implementors in the past twelve years. Simon outlines the organizational and management challenges faced during this time.

As well an outline of the challenges faced advice is also forthcoming based on Simon’s personal experiences. Amongst these a mantra very dear to my heart, that of  ‘baking in quality’.

Simon proposes solutions to the challenges still facing Agile implementors that deserve to be investigated. This is a well written, honest, insightful paper that all Agilists should read.

See on www.energizedwork.com

Day 2 of the YOW! 2011 Brisbane Conference was another day full of fantastic talks, book recommendations and more giveways. Today I picked up a PlayUp baseball cap, perfect for wearing during walks in the balmy Brisbane early evening sun. I also tucked into some more micro dots for afternoon tea thanks to ThoughtWorks…those things are addictive!

I was a little intimidated by the title of Damian Conway‘s Keynote ‘Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy!‘ that was opening the day. Reading that mouthful of a title and digesting it was anything but easy, whilst at the same time making me both equally excited and frightened by the possible content. It proved to be an enlightening experience. Poor Linda Rising had to follow Damian with her tips on ways to improve problem-solving and decision making which turned out to be both full of useful information and throughly enjoyable (and I even had a role in it!). The morning session was topped off well by Jim Webber‘s witty sermon on REST.

After lunch I absorbed some sage advice from Dave Thomas on working with Legacy Code in what was a change to the planned presentation. Kevin O’Neill then shared his interesting and informative tales from the trenches of mobile development with the audience. After afternoon tea Simon Peyton Jones returned to the stage gazing into his crystal ball and sharing his views on the future of Parallel programming, which not surprisingly was Declarative! – Another energetic, enjoyable and stimulating presentation by Simon. The conference closed out with a slightly self-indulgent NASA framed look at the use feedback in improving the software engineering process by Bjorn Freeman-Benson.

In this blog entry I will provide a brief synopsis of each of the sessions I attended. Comprehensive notes and details of the presentations I attended will hopefully follow over the coming weeks

Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy! – Damian Conway

Quantum Physics for Dummies

Damian Conway started the morning with a talk about the 3 most difficult topics of all time – Quantum Physics, General Relativity and Perl! He outlined his intention to provide pratical code solutions to theoretical physics problems. He also mingled in some Physics history into his presentation, beginning with the Copenhagen Interpretation that matter is ‘not in a state but in all states’.

Throughout this wonderful keynote Damian enthralled the crowd with his ingenious Perl code to model ‘zero-time’ computation using closed timelike curves, rod logic and positronic variables (that trend back in time!). Prior to each working example he introduced the concepts with contextual humour and fantastic deliberatly over-simplified visualizations. One of the numerous stories he told involved a rather famous Particle Physicist who lost a bet and had to include the word ‘penguin’ in his next paper – John Ellis thus invented ‘The Penguin Diagram‘.

This was a superlative keynote speech and it is not hard to see why Damian is a speaker in such high demand. He rounded off his speech with an unreadable but remarkable working piece of Perl code (in rod logic syntax) that tied his talk back to the rather daunting title. Now I understand it…Damian has made it seem so easy!

No Slides Available

Problem-solving and Decision-making in Software Development – Linda Rising

Linda Rising gave what she described as “the weird talk” of the conference where she set out some strategies and tips to improve problem solving and decision making. She let us know up front that studies existed to back up her tips, so if you look through her slides and want the information just contact her via her website for the papers.

"Treadmill Desk" - Moving stimulates the brain

Linda provided a series of normal tips, such as standing during meetings, avoiding long periods of focused attention, ensuring you move, take breaks, drink and eat, get some contact with nature, along side some whacker suggestions such as the ‘Treadmill Desk‘ and the ‘Cardboard Consultant’ (explain your problems to inanimate objects)! My favourite by a long way was the introduction of animals into the workplace, such as dogs to improve collaboration. Am sure Leo, my new rabbit would love to run wild around our offices.

She really wanted us all to promise we would try some techniques ourselves. I am sure I will try out a few of the techniques in the coming weeks, and I invite you to do the same.

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Domain-Driven Design for RESTful Systems – Jim Webber

Jim author of REST in Practice presented his sermon on REST with his customary English wit. His personal views that the web was benevelonet to stupid people and that the web is not our domain aimed to emphasise REST’s technology position. He also throughly engaged his audience by discussing a number of aged technologies that if you remembered put you in a group who would understand and ‘get’ REST, as opposed to the younger members of the audience who wouldn’t.

They 'Get' REST

Jim encourged the audience to embrace HTTP as an application protocol and to narrow HTTP into a Domain Application Protocol. Jim demonstrated ‘RestBucks‘ REST based workflows, use of static interfaces and state transitions using Hypermedia types. He also outlined his belief that specialization and innovation depend on an open set of operation-orientated services. This led on to an overview of Event-Driven computing using RESTful protocols.

Jim’s passion and belief in REST is often zealous in nature. His presentation is always enjoyable and engaging and this session was no different. I am old enough to understand and ‘get’ REST – which I think is a good thing!

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Innovation in Legacy Code – Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas has enourmous experience working with Legacy Code and his talk (a late replacement for an Eric Evans talk) provided some techniques and advice for working with such code. Dave initially outlined his definition of Legacy Code before alluding to the issue that this code, that is often making money for businesses, is a problematic area for many development teams.

Legacy Code

As well as refuting claims that rewrites can provide sufficient business value, Dave also dismissed beliefs that you can ‘just SOA it’, ‘Agile it’ or ‘outsource‘ this “big ball of mud”! He also provided a lengthy list of innovative Legacy Code case studies. Amongst these case studies were a techology driven modernization of legacy factory automation using TCP/IP interfaces in conjuction with HTTP/Atom feeds, and some human collaborative process changes that led to improved quality in a legacy insurance SOA EAP application.

This was an informative presentation on code issues that a lot of teams are currently tackling. Overall the message appeared to be, don’t be afraid of innovation in this area – rather embrace the pain to get the gain.

No Slides Available

Three ‘Tall’ Tales – Kevin O’Neill

This was the story of three mobile development projects through the eyes of mobile developer Kevin O’Neill. The tales focused on a card wall hack, getting to right from wrong and application testing based on Kevin’s real life project experience.

Zucchini iOS Testing Framework

These tales of real-life mobile development were full of insightful information that mobile development shops/teams should take note of. I would recommend watching the progress of ‘Zucchini‘, although I was a little surprised to hear Kevin say his preferred platforms were iOS, Windows Mobile ahead of Android!

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The Future is Parallel, and the Future of Parallel is Declarative – Simon Petyon Jones

Simon Peyton-Jones returned to the conference stage with another passionate, energetic presentation about Parallel computing and how declarative implementations such as Haskell provides are the future. He laid the foundation for the talk with an outline of how functional programming provides improved solutions to parallel computing problems.

Parallel Processing

Simon stated that Haskell provides explicit threads, semi-implicit parallelism and data parallelism to assist in this area. The main body of the presentation outlined these areas in further detail. Haskell’s Type System and Monads can be used to improve concurrent behaviour modelling. The cost model of semi-implicit parallelism is lowered through implementation of a ‘parMap’ Monad (for which Simon produced some statistical data). The overall view was that although there is no single cost model, functional programming has advantages in this development paradigm. Haskell was discussed but Scala, Erlang and F# are equally applicable.

Once more Simon engaged with the audience and took them all along with him on his study into parallel functional programming. With the inherent increase in the number of multicore machines parallel computing will become increasing prevelant. Without doubt it is worth understanding the concepts and implementations presented.

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Feedback Makes Everything Better: Understanding the Software Engineering Process – Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Bjorn presented an interesting session of how feedback can improve results and provide a competitive advantage. The session consisted of a number of human-powered flight and NASA related stories illustrating feedback usage. New Relic, Bjorn’s company provide feedback for web application performance to assist companies be more effecive.

The Fast Feedback Loop

Among the stories used to illustrate effective feedback was that of the ‘Gossamer Condor‘ – the first human powered flight. Through construction that enabled quick repairs they were able to get feedback on their design almost 350x faster than their competitors. He also outlined several NASA stories from Apollo program missons and Saturn rocket missions where feedback provided subsequent improvements. Bjorn illustrated relevant modern examples of these NASA situations that New Relic had encountered and address through utilization of fast feedback data.

Bjorn’s passion for NASA pervaded through the presentation appealing to all the space nuts, and he tied these in nicely with New Relic undertakings. With historical evidence, modern capabilities and statistical power available you can be left in no doubt that faster feedback can provide a competitive advantage – something all companies strive to achieve.

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The 2nd day of YOW! 2011 provided the usual insightful and informative presentations that I have come to expect from this conference. By the time I was supping on a beer with the rest of the attendees I was already eager to sign up for the 2012 event. Looking forward to attending YOW! 2012.

The summit consisted of 3 great talks from the LinkedIn team and the inventors/leads of the Artifactory and Gradle project. Unfortunatly the Jenkins presentation really was just a project update, which was rather dissapointing compared to the others. Not really worth waiting for, but we live and learn!

The talks in the presentation are:

• LinkedIn Case Study – present and future of LinkedIn’s codebase build
• “Who Moved My Module?!” – Yoav Landman, JFrog CTO and Artifactory Creator
• “Enter the Gradle” – Hans Dockter, Gradleware CEO and founder
• “Status of the Jenkins Project” – Kohsuke Kawaguchi, CloudBees architect and Jenkins Project lead

The LinkedIn team described the process they used to move their large collection of Ant build files to Gradle, including providing feedback on what they encountered and decisions they made. The team then went on to outline their custom release process. An interesting talk that. If you only watch one of the presentations – this is the one to watch.

The Artifactory presentation provides an overview of repository uses and release strategies and models. I really enjoyed the release strategies and the encouragement to release from the repository rather than using the build tool release plugins. A Maven comparison to an Artifactory release is outlined in this talk. Great talk – if you have a repository but don’t really think it is giving you much, this talk will give you ideas on how to improve its value and teach you that it is a vital tool in your continuous integration toolkit.

Hans Docktor provided the now customary Gradle demonstrative presentation, with plenty of great insights into how Gradle improves on previous build tools. I don’t think this presentation is as good as the Advanced Gradle presentation Hans gave at Groovy & Grails Exchange 2011, but it as usual well worth watching, especially if you are new to Gradle.

The Jenkins presentation really was just a project update. I found it rather dissapointing compared to those that came before. It was good to hear that Jenkins is healthy and its community is really active (compared to Hudson), but there was nothing here about how you can improve your use of the tool – which the other talks all provided, be it in processes or particular tools.

All in all it was great to see a collection of talks like this in one presentation. I am looking forward to the Second Continuous Integration Summit already…and hopefully it will be happening soon!

WordPress founder Matt Mullenwegs blogged about this addition and WordPress supports embedded tweets on its hosted blogs in a couple of ways. The Twitter Blackbird Pie or the Twitter Embed shortcode

As this is a standalone WordPress blog I had two options:

• Use the Twitter Blackbird Pie Plugin
• Embed Tweets using the Twitter generated HTML

So without further ado, here are the two options in action:

Twitter Blackbird Pie Plugin

Just applied a new Twitter theme called "Sandy Shore" to my profile, take a look! Got it from http://t.co/GEZnqiGb

December 23, 2011 3:16 pm via Tweety Got BackReplyRetweetFavorite

@PeterSellars

Peter Sellars

Twitter generated HTML

Just applied a new Twitter theme called “Sandy Shore” to my profile, take a look! Got it from TweetyGotBack.com

— Peter Sellars (@PeterSellars) December 23, 2011

I feel the Twitter generated HTML currently meets my expectations better than the Twitter Blackbird Pie Plugin.

The Twitter Blackbird Pie Plugin does not have a ‘follow’ button and has inserted the shortened url rather than the link alias. I would also like some of the capabilities offered by WordPress’ shortcode options included in the Plugin. I shall have to do a bit more digging I think!

Day 1 of the YOW! 2011 Brisbane Conference was full of fantastic talks, book recommendations and great giveaways as usual. As well as the YOW! 2011 Conference t-shirt I picked up an Atlassian t-shirt and enjoyed some micro dots for afternoon tea thanks to ThoughtWorks.

I had been really looking forward to the DevOps stream in the morning featuring Jez Humble of Continuous Delivery fame and ‘The Build Doctor’ himself Julian Simpson and had an enjoyable morning session. After lunch things begun to hit another level with two presentations by Joshua Kerievsky author of Refactoring To Patterns on Lean Startup and The Limited Red Society. I also enjoyed learning about QuickCheck testing capabilities from John Hughes, and Haskell from one of its founding fathers Simon Peyton-Jones. The JVM keynote from Oracle Vice President of Development Camron Purdy, which opened the conference, was interesting but not really worthy of its keynote status. I also failed to heed the lessons of conference pasts and went to another labourious IBM SOA presentation this time provide by Rachel Reinitz.

In this blog entry I will provide a brief synopsis of each of the sessions I attended. Comprehensive notes and details of the presentations I attended will hopefully follow over the coming weeks.

Top 10 JVM Erroneous Errors – Cameron Purdy

Cameron Purdy, Vice President of Development at Oracle started the conference off presenting his list of 10 JVM issues he would like to see addressed. His top 10 list ended up actually being 15 though as he continued to rattle off the issues after presenting his top 10! He got plenty of traction from past Java design decisions limiting its ability to adapt to modern developer whims.

The Java Virtual Machine Specification

He stated his opinion that Sun had not done as good a job of Java as he thought the case should be, imploring that Oracle would endevaour to do a better job. He presented his list with some humour but seemed to be met with mixed emotions from the crowd. The overall feel from the talk was that Java needed to become more dynamic, along the lines of Groovy and other current popular dynamic languages if it was to meet changing development needs.

Personally I found it quite interesting and although I will take interested looks in the direction Oracle takes Java and the JVM and how/when Cameron’s list is addressed by the team – I myself will be utilising Groovy to have access to the capabilities now.

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Continuous Delivery – Jez Humble and Martin Fowler

Continuous Delivery Book @Amazon

Having read and digested all the information in Continuous Delivery already I was expecting big things from this presentation. The loud mouth of Software Development Martin Fowler lived up to his billing with a fantastic bellow towering over poor Jez half way through representation. In truth I was a little dissapointed with the content – having read the book I wanted the ‘extra mile’ but the talk was aimed more at those who had not yet read the highly recommended book.

The talk outlined Continuous Delivery experiences and real-world examples of successful implementations, including the obligatory reference to Flickr whenever this topic is discussed. The main body of the presentation revolved around the observation that frequent delivery reduces risk rather than increasing it and that metrics provided by fast feedback are vital to succesful Continuous Delivery. It also aimed to debunk the myth that Continuous Delivery can’t work in Enterprise deployments.

Overall it was a good introduction to the topic (which no doubt was expanded on in the workshop scheduled later in the conference), providing an outline of practices that contribute to Continuous Delivery such as deployment pipelines, automation etc, but left me wanting more. If you had already read the book the presentation had little new to offer.

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We’re All Developers Now – Adventures in Infrastructure as Code – Julian Simpson

Unfortunaly for Julian this presentation was beset by technical issues from the start and I felt it affected his performance and the session never lived up to expectations for me. At one point Julian ran a demonstration which seemed painfully slow and was compounded by the fact it was a video from a live session using the venues really poor wifi!

The crux of the presentation was really a comparison of Puppet and Chef, two competing configuration management tools. Julian discussed why these tools are useful before proceeding to detail the differences between them from an implementation viewpoint. He also spent time discussing the need for collaboration between developers and administrators in the DevOps movement.

The Build Doctor - Julian Simpson

Overall I felt the presentation showed the differences between the two tools nicely and was a good introduction to their capabilities. Once again though I felt this introductory nature left me wanting more. I was hoping to hear more about server farm updating and management capabilites with examples and stories from the trenches.

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Lean Startup – Joshua Kerievsky

The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

This session was the stand out presentation of the conference for me, although some others didn’t seem to share my opinion – no surprise there considering the development focused audience. From a business/entrepreneureal viewpoint I like the principles and process behind Lean Startup. In this talk Joshua outlined differences between Lean Startup and Agile supported by some real-world implementation experience.

Joshua acknowledged Eric Ries and extracts from the The Lean Starup at several points in this talk, even though he tended to disagree and correct Ries views at times. His real focus was on the process Lean Startup utilises to see/eliminate waste in a capital efficient manner. The constant validation of hypothesis (scientific and measured goals) is at the centre of successful Lean Startup. The section on Customer Discovery resonated well with myself, and I have put some of it into practice already.

This presentation was presented in a really professional manner, in front of some legends of the Lean world (Mary and Tom Poppendieck) who appeared to endorse its content, which I think added to the validity of what Joshua had to say. It was great to hear about some real-world implementations of techniques discussed too. I tend to feel Lean and Agile are complimentary rather than competing techniques – although view both as labels for doing things more effectively!

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The Limited Red Society – Joshua Kerievsky

This was another inspiring talk from Joshua. This time his focus was on how to keep your code out of the red, and thus in a releaseable state at all times. Through the use of baseball statistics Joshua introduced and highlighted the value of statistics and data visualization. He then went on to show how tools his team are working on can assist in providing statistics for developer sessions that aim to improve their capabilities to keep code in the green.

The Limited Red Society

Joshua challenged the audience to consider how we measure the value/productivty of code checked out and being worked on. He invited us to look inside this black box of development using a tool his team are working with. The tool provides information on code status and activities during a recorded session. At the end of the session a visualization helps to assess if the session was productive and can be reviewed to look at ways developers can become more effective. A very interesting insight into development practices.

Having heard that J.B. Rainsberger had learnt he probably refactors at the wrong time too often by using the tool, Joshua had some real clout to back up the tools intended value. With the goal being to keep your code is in a releasable state more of the time – a worthy goal in my opinion. I feel every developer should strive to become a member of The Limited Red Society.

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SOA Connectivity and Integration…Real World Examples – Rachel Reinitz

Where should I start? I should have learnt my lesson from previous conferences and avoided the IBM SOA presentation at all costs! Something in my brain told me this would be different, it mentioned real world examples in the title for a start. I left the presentation reminding myself at any future conferences DO NOT attend an IBM SOA presentation.

IBM SOA - Gets The Red Card!!

There were real world examples discussed, cloaked in customer anonymity (what a surprise from IBM!). Often IBM were being portrayed as solutions saviours after smaller integration companies had apparently failed. Several references were made to teams that didn’t listen to IBM making mistakes in their solutions (reading between the lines – not implementing IBM software or heavy solutions as they should). It felt more and more like IBM beating up on the smaller players. More focus on how IBM overcame issues in ‘collaboration’ and learnt rather than dictated may have been more crowd friendly.

I was surprised that there were almost no tweets made about the presentation. Maybe those who enjoyed it were to afraid to say so and those who didn’t just could not be bothered to share their experience or were embarrassed to have been lured here in the first place! Little meaningful content, IBM are great, everyone else is doing it wrong delivered by an IBM zealot. Didn’t belong at such a great developer conference and got the red card from me.

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Better Testing with Less Work: QuickCheck Testing in Practice – John Hughes

John Hughes - Energetic & Informative QuickCheck Presenter

John Hughes grabbed both myself and the audiences attention from the outset with his energetic and passionate presentation technique. His demonstration of array reversal was met with audible laughter in the room, such a simple, visual and energetic demonstration of concepts woke up the late-afternoon crowd. This was certainly a talk people enjoyed judging by feedback too.

John was here to pitch the use of QuickCheck for property-based testing in the development process. QuickCheck’s property-based testing may not seem intuative immediatly but with some practice it has real benefits. John demonstrated the QuickCheck capabilites that enable users to test more, with better tests and more tests than other libraries provide.

At its heart is the minimum failing case that QuickCheck reports when tests fail, without which the tool would be nothing more than a test generator – it is far more than that. John provided some real-world implementation examples and how QuickCheck even helped solve a complex Parallel Execution/Race Condition issue in a legacy codebase.

This was a well received presentation and there is no doubt QuickCheck is worthy of closer investigation. I would like to investigate the control of data used by the tool to create tests etc, and if the minimum failing test case meets my concerns over the failing of more than one test case based on a single property change. Also where does the tool fit in, should it be used to identify missing unit tests or as a replacement for them? Great tool though…off to investigate it now!

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Escape from the Ivory Tower: The Haskell Journey From 1990 to 2011 – Simon Peyton Jones

This was a fabulous keynote presented with passion, enthusiasm and ultimate Geek appeal by Simon Peyton Jones. His energy, facial expressions, body language and amusing deliver had the majority of the audience captivated by this talk. Haskell may be the realm of functional programming devotees but this presentation appealed to the massed ranks of YOW! Brisbane.

Haskell - Think Like A Computer Scientist

Simon took the audience along on his Haskell journey from its founding principles, its principle driven evolution over the past 21 years, and its continued attempts to avoid success at all costs! With humours self-deprecation Simon showed how Haskell is ‘a language everyone talks about but no one uses..’ and outlined the languages key features, and how some design decisons have been reached and implemented as the language continues to evolve. He waxed lyrical about Monads & Type Classes as the foundation for Haskell usefulness.

A fabulous way to end the first day of YOW! Brisbane 2011 this was truly an inspiring story. Simon showed that with enough passion and faith in your principles whilst sticking to your guns you may just be able to infect others. We may not all jump in and start using Haskell, but there is no doubt understanding the ideas behind it could make us better programmers in whatever language we choose to use.

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Overall day 1 got better as it progressed with a slight blip on the radar when I made the mistake of attending the IBM SOA talk. The two talks from Joshua Kerievsky were inspiring, John Huges was stimulating and energetic whilst Simon Peyton Jones provided great entertainment and plenty pf food for thought. I was definetly feeling invigorated and day 2 was eagerly anticipated.