Meet the experts at codecentric
Yesterday, we had the first “meet the experts” at codecentric, featuring 4 talks, open space, lots of food, and several Guitar Hero battles.
First for the official part – we had 4 talks about the following topics:
- Performance Antipatterns – Mirko Novakovic, codecentric
- Live performance tuning – Kirk Pepperdine
- The secrets of concurrency – Dr. Heinz Kabutz
- Continuous performance management – Alois Reitbauer, dynatrace
While I had already heard Mirko’s talk a couple of times (not hard to imagine, he’s given the talk on conferences as well as in-house at codecentric), the other talks were new to me both from a technical point of view as well as from the personal point of view. I did know Alois before, though.
Meeting Kirk and Heinz was a really nice experience – Kirk demonstrated live how to do performance analysis using basic, free tools, which was great fun to watch. Heinz explaines his ten laws related to concurrency, including “The law of Cretan Driving” which Heinz explained by some very funny storys and pictures of road traffic in Greece, especially Crete where he lives and works. Listening to his talk, I was quite happy that I’ve never had to do anything concurrency-related myself in web development :-)
In the open space, I learned why Hibernate wins over Toplink, which was in fact rather a history lesson than a direct feature-based shootout – actually, I’m a bit sad that there is basically no “recorded history” of software, open source etc. I also learned that the majority of Eclipse committers works at IBM, which I didn’t really know before – but if you look at Eclipse commits or issues, you do find a lot of IBM people there ;-) I also went to another open space session held by Heinz Kabutz where he spoke about his lates puzzle and some other newsletter topics – visit JavaSpecialists.EU if you’re interested – it’s packed with interesting topics.
In between the open space sessions, we had some really great food, as well as during the day – the evening catering was even more fun because the entire setup was moved from our building to the outside where we spent a really great time eating, chatting away and drinking. As usual, the codecentric team partied hard, supported by participants, the invited experts and a couple of guys from dynatrace. It was quite nice to have some relaxed conversations, and the weather was just absolutely perfect!
Last but not least, I’d like to mention the open space highlight of the day, announced by my workmate Nick – because “performance” was the topic of the day, he announced an open space session called “Performing on Guitar Hero” which turned into quite an entertaining event. We saw Kirk, Jeroen (Xebia) and a couple of other people overcome the initial frustration and then happily rock away, battling each other – there were quite a couple of cheers and hard laughs involved :-)
I’d like to thank codecentric for organizing this event, and I’d also like to thank both the experts and the participants for making this a very interesting and memorable day. I’m looking forward to the next two “meet the experts” events!
Sorry for lots of text – I think that appropriate images will be published on our company blog next week, as soon as everyone is back at the office. Thanks for your attention :-)
[...] audience a few times “This is not a sales presentation”). So go on and read Rob’s blog post about the event. More are to come, so make sure you keep any eye on the meet the experts web site [...]