No Fluff, Just Stuff, Sharp People

Okay, I am a geek and a technologist, and I admit that I love this kind of Stuff (take that as a disclaimer if you must). However, over the years, I have had the good fortune to attend some great training courses and conferences. I have also attended some not so great conferences and training too. Perhaps I was spoiled early. I worked at SAS Institute back in the 1980’s (employee number 72, or something like that), and later used SAS products a lot in my work at the Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP). SAS, both the product and the company, were very important to me. Anyway, I remember going to SAS Users Group conferences, and attending SAS training classes. The sessions and the training were nose down, hands-on, and spot on. I got a bunch of mileage out of them. Those were not the only good experiences. There have been many since, but, like other folks, I have also seen the quality, and technical punch of presentations vary wildly within the same show, and between shows, over the years.

That brings us to last week. Several of us trotted out to the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium 2008 here in Saint Louis. Among our group were developers, our Chief Architect, and a product manager. We each went with differing goals about what we wanted to get out of NFJS. In the end, we all walked away with a great experience and armed with new ideas, knowledge, and tools that we could use in our own areas of focus. We met some sharp people, and made some new friendships, and that is really the best part of it all.

As Michael pointed out in blogging his NFJS experience, there were eleven sessions with a total of sixty-six classes offered over the three days. The classes ran an hour-and-a-half  each, and you got a lot of content in that time. On the last day, I ran into one of our folks in the hallway between classes, and he had that "Information overload! Will I survive this?" look on his face. Yep, No Fluff, Intense Stuff. Courses offered a smorgasbord of topics. Classes were offered on Java internals, class loaders, memory management, and hacking the JVM. Methodology sessions offered Behavior Driven Development, Agile topics, and even a product-neutral approach to choosing a Rich Internet Application framework. That is just scraping the surface: Web 2.0 technologies, REST, Groovy and Grails, Performance tuning, Testing, Open Source licenses, Spring, Scala; the list goes on and on. You can cover a lot of Stuff in sixty-six classes, with sharp people leading the sessions, and likewise encouraging the attendees, many sharp people themselves, to ask questions, and contribute.

There, I said sharp people again. It must be a theme. I do not remember hearing any of our group come out of a session making comments like "that was an utter waste of time, I’ll avoid that guy’s other classes." Between the five of us, we covered classes by most, if not all of the instructors. Just go to the NFJS site, read over the bios, and you will see what a diverse group the instructors are. When I last blogged, I wrote about how new ideas emerge when people from diverse backgrounds and foci get together. That, I think, is one of the things NFJS is all about.

Would I go again? Oh, yeah.