My survey responses to the 2011 nfjs Central Iowa Software Symposium event for my company.

Benefits to you and the company from attending this event:
Keep up to date regarding the current technologies and development in the Java community.

Information that your co-workers / the company should be aware of:
Functional programming is making a big splash on the JVM. We really should come out of the traditional OO & imperative programming mindset and start think of solving programming challenges in a multi-paradigm fashion. We should upgrade from CVS to Git 🙂

Information that you learned that may have negative impacts to the company:
None

Would recommend this event / company presenting to someone else? Why?
Yes. The presenters have great knowledge about their topics. They always make me think harder and different about what I am doing at work.

Additional Comments or Suggestions:
I greatly enjoyed learning more about Scala, akka and functional programming thinking. The multi-paradigm session by Ted Neward opened my eyes. I took logic & functional programming courses in college and was super impressed by how concise and powerful those languages can be used to solve particular issues. Now many frameworks on the JVM prove that as Java programmers (who are innately OO & imperative), we may fully utilize the power of programming languages of other paradigms. This motivates me to explore a newer realm of programming.

I learned a lot from the Seven wastes of software development session e.g. communication is 38% tone, 7% words & 55% body languages. Therefore we should avoid plain emails for especially business rules discussion; converse with a coworker face to face is a much more effective way of communication. I think I don’t always do well in this area. Perhaps programmers are generally shy and introverted. I need to learn to open up more.

I also loved the Spock session although I feel Spock as a framework is yet completely mature for prime time. The fact it doesn’t have a version 1.x release somewhat speaks for this. (And it’s not yet in maven central repository.) I love its various features. But it’s still under heavy development phase as its community is actively adding more features to the framework. If we start using it now, we may need to upgrade our code dramatically later to get its full effects e.g. the @Unroll feature is going to change soon. However, I’m super excited to revisit it in a few months or so to see where it’s at. The fact that it’s a test framework great for both state testing & interaction testing (mocking) is awesome! It sounds like the mocking part of it is yet as mature as other mocking frameworks e.g. Mockito. For example, it doesn’t support partial mock/spy. This does not make me want to switch from Mockito to use it.

I will also use many of the new features of Groovy I learned since I just started using Groovy for testing. The SQL class Groovy has is extremely powerful and gave me many ideas as how I can utilize it to make testing more dynamic and more maintenance free.