Great Time at the Scala Meeting

I had a great time at the Scala meeting here in Atlanta, tonight. This was the first time for the Scala group to meet in a central location (Same place as the AJUG meetings) and the group was able to double their attendance to almost 20 attendees.

For me it was also very nice to meet Lex Spoon, co-author of 'the book' on Scala 'Programming in Scala'. Also, this is a small world - As a Java Posse fan, it was interesting to realize that John Weathers, the organizer for the Scala Meetup Group and Dick Wall worked together in Atlanta. Besides being a big advocate for Java, Dick is also very involved with the Scala scene in the Bay Area.

Anyway, seeing the potential of Scala combined with the talent we are having here in Atlanta, there is a great bright future for the Scala community, and with it the larger JVM community. These are exciting times!

Scala Meetup in Atlanta (3 Dec 2009)

Just updated the AJUG website. recognizing that various JVM languages are gaining popularity, we will be starting to sponsor the Atlanta Scala Meetup (With meeting space). The next meeting is on December 3rd, 2009 at the usual AJUG location (Holiday Inn Select)

For more details, please visit: http://www.ajug.org/ and http://www.meetup.com/atlanta-scala/.

¡Viva La JVM!

NFJS Conference Atlanta 2010 - Day 1

Today was the first day of the NFJS conference here in Atlanta. It's my third time and it is always a great experience in terms of sessions but it is also a good opportunity to network.

First I went to two sessions of Venkat Subramaniam: "Effective Java" and "Programming Scala", both excellent sessions. I get the feeling, it is really time to look beyond Java, particularly if you do anything around concurrency. Not sure if Scala will be it, there seemed to be some contention in the crowd regarding Scala's more cryptic syntax. Although, it looked manageable in my opinion. Nevertheless, I need to check out the Clojure talk tomorrow.

The third session I attended was "Transaction Pitfalls and Strategies" by Mark Richards. At first I was a bit hesitant attending the session but I was glad I did. A related article can be found at IBM DeveloperWorks. The presentation contained some really good stuff.

The first day ended with a very good keynote by Ted Neward on Iconoclasm. Oh well, it is 1am already...better get some sleep for day two of the conference.