Dev Camp Pune Rundown
Last saturday, I was at Dev camp pune organized by thoughtworks. It was my first dev camp and I heard good things about the event held in bangalore. This was also my first time at thoughtworks office in pune, which I must admit is pep with a industrial shed kind of feel to it (specially the ceilings) I usually debate with myself at the net utility of attending conferences and meetups and most often the lazy in me takes over and I end up attending very few but dev camp had some amazing sessions on cards and so I was there.
I was very interested in functional programming sessions on display but was disappointed because both clojure and scala sessions got cancelled, the first session I attended was on GIT object model and there were some good insights by Praveen on the internal representation and working of GIT which mostly concentrated on how git stores commits, trees and files using hashes and how do these change in case of branching, commits, tagging etc. Session was mostly hands on and he also demoed some low level git commands which I was unaware off. So far so good.
Then came the good part, I stumbled into couple of college friends and we got to catchup over lunch. After lunch, we chose to attend applying functional programming patterns to OO by mark needham and it was a fast paced presentation showing loads of code C# snippets on applying functional programming, I feel the presentation lacked perspective on the why and benefits part. He briefly discussed functional programming ideologies but I felt it needed more coverage as functional programming is still not widely used in indian IT. I am sure most people attending confused it with procedural programming. Key outcomes from the presentation were:
1> Use functional programming in small changes to avoid duplication and for refactoring.
2> Functional programming in OO can lead to bad readability of code if overused. You tend to read inside out..
3> Functional programming is more about transformation of your mind as a programmer and the way you look at problems.
4> The input-output paradigm is beautiful when it comes to building fluent api's ( like jquery )
We then attended Deep dive into nodejs by srikant, which was something I was looking forward to eagerly. The presentation started with some practical benefits and hello world type demos showing structure of a nodejs program. It again I feel lacked perspective and discussion on ideologies behind nodejs as to why everyone is talking about nodejs and why javascript is one of the most suited language for even driven framework. Srikant demoed a impressive application he built using nodejs and sinatra, rest of the session was dedicated at deconstructing code of his nifty application. All in all nodejs session was highly hands on but I would have liked it more if there was discussion on why part to put things in perspective, other thing I feel srikant could have stressed on is that nodejs is more suited at buiding network programs/services rather than building full blown web applications. I think this kind of led to confusion as many people asked on about production suitability of nodejs. All in all it was a great hands on session at one of the most exciting find of 2010 for me at-least.
The day was soon ending and I then decided to give DSL in groovy's a ditch over a lightning talk by Ram on scaling your infrastructure for large teams, this I feel was the best session at dev camp for its simplicity and Ram's presentation skills. He openly discussed the problems he face as sys admin at thoughtworks and the key lessons he learned at big projects, some of the important lessons learned were:
1> Virtualization is not just a buzz word, its real and can be put to use very effectively.
2> How SVN sucks for large teams and that replacing it with something like git is not just a technical problem but a cultural and people problem.
3> How ZFS saved his life more than one time.
Dev Camp pune was a nice experience all in all and I look forward to attending more of these dev camps and maybe organizing such camps on latest and greatest in pune.
