I had the wonderful opportunity of being sponsored by No Fluff, Just Stuff Symposiums to speak at the New Hampshire JUG in Portsmouth on Tuesday. It was a lively crowd of 20 or so persons hosted by the excellent Ted Pennings, Matt Merrill, NHJUG, and Scott Curry.

We discussed Git, GitHub, IntelliJ, and eGit with regards to their importance to the broad JVM ecosystem. Many insightful questions were asked, such as “is the efficiency of the hard links to unchanged blobs maintained on Windows.” The answer was yes, because this is not actually a POSIX hardlink for commits, but rather an implementation like, but not exactly hardlinks inside Git tree objects.

CFMeetup

On Thursday, I had the equally delightful opportunity to speak to the CFMeetup online group, hosted by Charlie Aerhart and facilitated in part by Mike Henke, and supported by Tim Cunningham. It had a turnout of 35-45 persons, and has a significant additional viewership for the recorded sessions at Vimeo.

Resources

I promised some links to Git resources and they are as follows:

• Presentation slides in PDF format
• Curated Git links
• Git GUIs
• ProGit.org Free Online Book
• Gitorious open source web app for self-hosted Git repos
• GitHub’s unlimited free open source project hosting

Thanks to everyone that attended and made it a great time for me through their interactivity and questions.

I had the pleasure of presenting seven talks at the NFJS Reston Virginia show this weekend. Two of those talks were Git-centric. One was a traditional presentation and the other was a workshop.

No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium in Atlanta

This was my first time presenting at an NFJS event in Atlanta, and you can be certain I’ll be back. Earlier in the Summer, I had the opportunity to address the Atlanta Java Users Group (AJUG) and show off the flexibility of Git. For the NFJS Symposium, I talked about Hadoop, Git, Encryption on the JVM and Open Source Debugging, which are my “fun but informative talks” lineup for 2010.

Colorado Springs Open Source User Group

Gary Hessler runs a great user group in Denver’s sister city to the south. I had the opportunity to present Git, one of my favorite topics since it is accessible no matter what language you program in and what platform you use. My NFJS colleague, Tim Berglund presented his always well-received Decision Making talk. It is an interesting divergence from the typical programmer presentation and gives you techniques to deal with team dynamics.

JavaZone in Norway

The ever-excellent JavaBin User Group in Norway put on a stellar conference called JavaZone for 2000+ people. What a show! The diversity of talk formats, speakers, and topics is simply incredible. After the conference, about 25 of us experienced a once-in-a-lifetime event of hiking in the Norwegian countryside. The otherworldly photos and hike details will make you want to attend next year!

The sessions are recorded at JavaZone and two of mine are available online. The former was in the big room in a formal setting. The latter talk was in a smaller room at the end of the conference and had a more informal feel where questions could be asked of the audience and vice-versa.
Encryption Boot Camp on the JVM

Hadoop: Divide and Conquer Gigantic Datasets

StrangeLoop in St. Louis Missouri

After returning from JavaZone, I headed to Missouri for the super-technical event named StrangeLoop brewed by Alex Miller. The lineup of speakers was stellar and the non-profit atmosphere was very relaxing. Hilary Mason, Guy Steele, Yehuda Katz, Josh Bloch, Doug Crockford, and many others. I will be attending next year if the timing works out again.

No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium in Minneapolis

My home base of conferences, NFJS, brought me up to the always warm audiences of Minneapolis. This has to be one of my top-5 favorite stops on the tour due to the beautiful hotel and the technologically advanced attendees. Their questions are deep and I try to be as prepared as possible for them. I had the privilege of Brian Sletten and David Hussman sitting in my classes about Hadoop.

SpringOne

The sprint of conferences concluded with my attendance and helping out with the logistics of SpringOne2GX in Chicago. The hotel was spectacular and the attendance overwhelming. It seemed to be just shy of a 1000 people and double last year’s attendance. I attended some great sessions and had hallway chats with the likes of Hamlet D`Arcy, Hans Dockter, Paul King, Andres Almiray (our co-incidence rate at conferences is getting to be uncanny!), Peter Bell, and Chris Beams. I’ll try to put in some abstracts for next year and get invited to speak!

This week, I made a four day journey to the very forested state of North Carolina. Joey knew a Coloradoan was coming and turned on the statewide AC to bring it down to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit when I landed. The food was great, the people were super, and the technology was awesome.

Relevance

I had an open invitation to come out and visit the team at Relevance, which I’d been waiting to cash in. The Research Triangle NFJS Symposium finally made that visit possible.

I had a great time meeting the entire Relevance team, working with Stu Halloway on automating the Clojure release scripts through some Bash scripting, Git calls and Maven Ant Tasks.

At lunch, I gave a live demo of my workflow with the DevonThink Pro product, including capturing and aggregating multiple RSS streams alongside archived emails and snippets from web pages.

In the afternoon, I had the fun assignment of working with Aaron Bedra on an implementation of JCE symmetric AES encryption on a Clojure project. He followed up a day later on “Relevance Open Source Friday” by beginning to move the implementations over to a standard library for upcoming public consumption.

No Fluff, Just Stuff

I had the pleasure of presenting Encryption, Open Source Debugging on the JVM (over 50 deliveries of that one now), Hadoop, Maven 3 and Git to the engaged audience in Raleigh on Friday and Saturday. The during-presentation questions were spot on, and even when the topics got heady, the students just leaned forward in their chairs and kept on making insightful inquiries. Attendees of that nature are pure candy to a passionate presenter like myself. I especially want to thank Darin Pope, Billy Dupre, David Bloom, David Deininger, Sri Sankaran, Asif Rashid, and Ed Savage for providing much-desired feedback on Twitter.

I know I’ll be back for the NFJS show next year, but I’ll make all efforts to put in a few more visits prior to that. A city with a technology culture of this strength demands that I do. Thanks for having me and perhaps I’ll see some of you at the Rich Web Experience in December on the beaches of sunny Florida.

Resources

For the folks that attended my talks this weekend, here are some constantly updated supplemental materials to resources that are paired with the slides:

Encryption

• Encryption, Delicious Bookmarks
• Encryption, Source Code Samples

Open Source Debugging

• Open Source Debugging on the JVM, Delicious Bookmarks
• Open Source Debugging on the JVM, Source Code Samples

Hadoop

• Hadoop, Delicious Bookmarks
• Hadoop, Source Code Samples

Maven 3

• Maven 3, Delicious Bookmarks
• Maven 3, Source Code Samples

Git

• Git, Delicious Bookmarks
• Git, Source Code Samples

I’m excited to be presenting at the Rich Web Experience this December. It’ll be a great show, but the venue location simply adds to the magnetism. Who can resist beaches and Florida in December?

I’ll be doing a sharpened version of my iOS workshop with Ben Ellingson. Attendance numbers will be greatly limited compared to our last time we ran this workshop so as to give plenty of one-on-one attention to students. We’ll get to use the latest iOS 4 SDK with its polished UI, developer-helpful features and Git integration. I hope you’ll consider joining us for this special one-day addition to the conference. Ben and I will be tempted to run the workshop on the beach.

I’ll also be doing a Git workshop in the main portion of the show. If you haven’t already heard, Git (and GitHub) is the hot new open source source code control tool that is agnostic to your programming language of choice but adds features driven by developer needs, not by marketing teams. Bring your notebook, see what the buzz is about, and walk away with a Monday-morning-equipped set of skills to apply Git on your next project.

See you on the beach!

In about 75 minutes, I’ll explain why the Git Version Control System deserves your attention as your next version control system. I’ll show you its blazing speed adding 5000 files to a repo, creating a repository at GitHub, initiating a local branch, merging with a colleague’s repository, and finding which commit broke the integration tests.

I’ve also set up a few resources for attendees to peruse after the talk, including:

• Git Instructions executed during the lecture/workshop
• Git Delicious Bookmarks
• Git 101 Video
• Matthew’s Git DZone RefCard

In short, if you have the least bit of dissatisfaction with your existing version control system, this talk should tip you squarely in favor of the new world of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS), and specifically, my favorite implementation, Git.

To make it efficient for the attendees of my sessions to get to the resources of my talks, I’m listing them all in this blog post.

Encryption on the JVM

• Matthew’s Encryption Delicious Bookmarks
• Matthew’s GitHub Encryption Sample Projects

Hadoop

• Matthew’s Hadoop Delicious Bookmarks
• Matthew’s GitHub Hadoop Workshop Code

Maven 3

• Matthew’s Maven Delicious Bookmarks
• Matthew’s GitHub Maven Sample Projects

This is a tidbit of insight about my radically revised techniques for assembling complex compelling presentations this year. I’m certain it will create a widely varied set of comments and feedback.

Earlier this year, Neal Ford, Nate Schutta and I were driving from the Des Moines No Fluff Just Stuff show in the pouring rain. Pouring hard enough to stop a dashboard GPS device from working. Hard enough to stop all outbound flights from the airport. Hard enough to cause us to lightly hydroplane. In short, a normal NFJS weekend.

This fury of nature would not deter us from our technical discussions and the subject of presentations with large quantities of moving parts came up. I said that “for a certain set of presentation demos that contain around 5 or more interwoven components — not JAR dependencies mind you — keeping this operational for the course of a year of presenting was more work than building it in the first place and highly crash prone.” We debated aggressively, but Neal interjected at one point and said “You should just try it.” And thus, I did.

Neal, Nate and I have a project that we’ll be able to tell you more about soon. Related to this project, we’re attempting to give names to these presentation patterns and anti-patterns. For example, Neal dubbed the above discussion’s output the “Lipsync Pattern.“

Recording Tools

In terms of tooling, I’ve become very attached to Screenflow 2.0. I previously used iShowU HD, but its capabilities are now far exceeded by Screenflow in terms of seamlessly stitching together multiple pieces of footage in a meaningful way.

Feedback

Feedback from this technique for my Open Source Debugging talks have been overwhelmingly positive. Some examples are:

“Thanks for giving the great talk on open source debugging tools last night at BJUG. Specifically the part where you “played through” the typing/console. It sort of reminded me of prezi.com, with the way you were able to zoom into sections of slides, seemingly capture keyboard input, etc. Loved it.”

and another really captures the essence of why I feel this is a meaningful way of teaching:

“I liked that you used a recorded version vs. live coding. I felt like you were able to explain things better than other presenters I’ve seen who try and field questions while coding live. Also the spotlighting and highlighting really helped the flow.”

Applying this Technique

When using this approach, I’ve found, through the feedback of friends like Scott Davis, that it’s best to exaggerate the fact that you are not live coding. Joke about it. And lastly, make it a positive trade by discussing what’s happening in the playback in a dialogue with the audience.

Summary

I’m becoming so jaded that I (internal voice, not external) am having a hard time watching some live coding speakers now. It’s often swordplay showmanship on the level of Errol Flynn. It has nothing to do with teaching. And it usually bombs, at least in a minor way, somewhere, and we spend 2 minutes watching the speaker “clean it up.”

I hear that there’s going to be a “Presentation Patterns and Anti-Patterns” book with Neal’s name on it. Based on my positive experience, I can only say, “the sooner the better Neal.”

Sometimes things just don’t go perfectly in the open source world. There are times where it seems like a dot release cures many things, but then breaks/regresses several important ones as well. Like the XML parsing in the iPhone demo. Turns out, it was a Grails 1.1 issue (which I upgraded to from 1.0.3 to solve another bug) in which optional URL parameters are wrongly required. Grails 1.1.1 fixes it, which I validated at 11pm last night, but it would have been fun to live fix this with the audience. This reinforces the point in my talk though that you should always check your web services, possibly using curl, or SOAPui prior to connecting your iPhone application to them.

It’s amazing to see how many of the presenters and audience members are on Twitter and posting their experiences about the conference. That’s a real change from last year, where hardly anyone was live posting in that fashion. I hope to see you all again in the Fall at the next Denver NFJS, loaded with more difficult questions and an inquiring state of mind.