[ajug-members] Registration is ready for AJUG's Open Space event!

[Les Hazlewood]

Ok, so I started to reply to this thread with a lot of questions.  This
reply is interesting in that I've already answered myself before
posting, but I thought I'd post it anyway, in case other people are
curious about the same thing:

--- Original reply ---

Can someone please explain to me the benefit of this event, say, versus
the time that we spend with each other either before, during, or after
AJUG meetings?

>From the theme: "Our desire is to hold a meeting about what we are doing
and should be doing with Java. What’s working? What is not
working? These are the conversations we wish to have, passionate
discussions about where things are going."

I noticed is that it is a 2 day event with no real set plan for
speakers, topics, break-out sessions, etc.  It currently seems very
free-form and that it could run off on many different tangents, some or
many of which may not be very useful to the majority of attendees (who
knows, I'm only speculating).  What I would _not_ want to happen is that
we sit in a room for 2 days, express what we like, gripe about what we
don't and then we go home feeling good about ourselves 'cause Java is
cool.'  How can I use this type of event to benefit me and my employees
to be better engineers in Atlanta?

Basically, without trying to sound too much like an ass <grin>, why
would I want to pay $75 for this and miss two days of work when it
sounds like something I do with my friends, employees, and fellow
AJUGers all the time?

--- End original reply. ---

So, in thinking about what I wrote, the answer to me is that it would be
good to attend this as an "industry awareness" event, especially for the
Java folks out there that are nose-to-the-grindstone in their
organization and don't have much visibility into the Atlanta community. 
I initially questioned the event because I (very fortunately) engage in
these kinds of activities quite regularly.  I realize not everyone has
this opportunity, and for those that don't or can't do it so much, this
type of event would be a massive benefit in shaping your career - the
frameworks you choose, architectural techniques you employ in your
software, the processes to which you adhere, how you do QA, etc.  These
things can all be shaped by such an event, which can in turn enrich your
career, help you enjoy your job more, and generally make you a more
satisfied engineer.

To underscore the importantce of such event, I recently was exposed to
some code during a consulting engagement that almost made me cry when I
read it.  And I'm not talking about one or two lines - I'm talking over
1900 source files - the huge majority of them just crap.  Absolute
honking pieces of garbage,
fire-the-person-immediately-if-they-worked-for-me utter crap.  But these
files/classes were created by so called Java programmers.  Why did they
think they were doing the right thing and I thought they needed to be
tarred, feathered, and beaten with a wet fish?  Another example is
another Atlanta area company I know of that still uses C-based CGI for
_new_ web based apps.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD - WHY???? (I know why they
did it - and it was for horrible reasons - but I won't explain why here
lest I go off on a raging furious tangent that would make children cry).

Industry events like these can expose these things out in the open so
that these engineers don't repeat these mistakes.  If they attended such
an event, they could be enlightened as to why things were so bad.  Maybe
they just didn't know.  One person's obvious solution could be another's
difficult challenge - we all benefit from learning from each other this
way.

Anyway, my only comment left would be that I would like to see a tad
more structure (topics of discussion, break out sessions, etc) at least
to reduce the amount of tangents that we could go on - we technical
people are well-known to do that quite often :) - and I'd like to make
sure people get as much utility as possible instead of tangents that
benefit a few.  If that was in place, I think there are a lot of
engineers that could benefit from an event with a good amount of
visibility into Java trends.  I for one would like to talk about things
like security, dynamic languages, next-gen frameworks, multi-lingual VM
support (Smalltalk, JRuby, etc), and more.

I hope I can make it!

Cheers,

Les 


On Wed, 4 Apr 2007 08:23:19 -0400, "Bill Siggelkow" <bsiggelkow at mac.com>
said:
> Paul, it's $75
> 
> Bill Siggelkow
> bsiggelkow at mac.com
> AIM: siggelkowb
> Home: 770-457-8854
> Mobile: 770-354-2584
> 
> 
> On Apr 4, 2007, at 7:01 AM, Paul McKibben wrote:
> 
> > Barry,
> >
> > Can you tell us how much the registration fee is?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >    Paul
> > _______________________________________________
> > ajug-members mailing list
> > ajug-members at ajug.org
> > http://www.ajug.org/mailman/listinfo/ajug-members
>