Okc Jug - Collections Presentation

Paul and I gave a presentation over the Java Collections Framework at the Oklahoma City Java Users Group Tuesday.

I'm so glad that is over... co-presenting is tough, especially without really practicing. I really think we would have done a better job if it had been just one of us doing the presentation.

We ran out of time way before we got to most of the good stuff. Oh well, we have now paid our dues. Maybe the Steering Committee people will quit bugging us to do a presentation. We were the only ones who hadn't done one.

My hope is that we did a bad enough job that they won't ask us to do it again. ;-)

I now have a little understanding what it takes to do a presentation at the jug. I should have spent more time on the presentation but I did spend about 20 hours reading, writing tests, and working on the slides.

I really enjoyed the 'wheel of fish'. Using the registration list and the Collections.rotate(list, randomNbr). I 'spun' the wheel and the winner got the shirt Laura helped my make:


The shirt says something like "I Survived the Collections Framework presentation at the Okc Java Users Group by Brian S. and Paul S., December 9th, 2008"

Okc Jug - April meeting

Wow what a day. Our lunch meeting had 47 people - yet another record. I think this one will stand a while. A lot of people wanted to come see Craig Walls, author of Spring in Action. Craig did a pretty good job at lunch. He didn't have much time and so he wasn't able to go into a lot of details on Spring. Too bad.

The evening meeting had 7 people. I was very happy to see Kurt and Kris Vanderwater. I met Kris thru the Francis Tuttle Advisory Board. Biju Kurian even showed up.

I reminded Brett Schuchert that he needs to bring a book to me. I got the book from O'Reilly and he was supposed to read it and post a review. I guess he hasn't been interested in reading the book.

The lunch meeting was a nightmare for me.

• Scott Centille and I went by Kinko's to pick up the flyers for NFJS and had to wait 15 minutes while they printed them. Not too bad but Jay said they'd be ready by 11:30.
• So we get to UoP and room 308 is locked. I get my phone out to call them and there is a message from the pizza delivery person.
• I go down stairs to get them to open room 308.
• After I ask them to unlock the room, the pizza person calls and doesn't have a clue where UoP is. I guide her to a parking place and we both load up with pizza and pop. There are still several 2 liters to bring up. Judy Xu helped carry some stuff - thanks Judy.
• We get upstairs and the room is still locked. But Jason Lee and Craig Walls were there! Yeah, at least they got there from the airport in plenty of time.
• I set the pizza and pop down and head for the stairs. I get back down to the 1st floor about the same time the pizza person and some others get off the elevator. I tell them which direction to go to get to her car.
• I then go into the UoP office and ask them to open room 308. I had told them 311 earlier - ARGHHH!!!
• I go outside to help carry the rest of the pop in and they are standing around wondering where this lady's car is.
• I say it's this way and head to her car. We grab the rest of the stuff and head back upstairs.
• We get to the room and it's open!!! It's now 12:30 - the time the meeting was supposed to start.
• I start setting up and some others start setting out the pizzas. Lots of people are filing in. I had wanted to get there in time to rearrange the tables so people could get around easier. Well forget that. I tell some people to go get chairs. Room 311 is now locked again - that's where I was gonna grab some chairs from.
• So we go to another room and steal about 10 chairs.
• I passed out a bunch of evals and start a couple of sign-in sheets going around the room.

The rest of lunch wasn't too bad.

Now, the evening meeting.

• I show up around 5:20 and Jason and Craig are still in 308. We were supposed to be in 311 for the evening meeting. Ok, we'll stay until we get kicked out.
• Guess what, we get kicked out.
• We move to another room, then another room, and finally we get to a room that isn't needed. OMG.

The evening meeting was really good. Lot's of Q&A that I barely understood and some I did understand. I asked what Craig to tell us about Wicket. But he didn't say too much about it. He did talk about OSGI which is a component architecture (I think) and AOP stuff, and differences with 2.0 and 2.5 and why they still use proxy's. Most of it was above my head.

I get home and rest a little while. I then get out the laptop and get the eval spreadsheet ready for my wonderful wife to enter the new evals and email addresses into. She gets it all entered and I tidy it up a bit and send it in an email to the steering committee.

We may need a bigger room for the lunch meetings. yuck.

What a fun day!!!

Francis Tuttle Advisory Council meeting

I just attended a very good meeting Francis Tuttle. The meetings' objective was to help direct Marc Hill and FT on what they can teach in 2 years to produce students who can then enter the workforce (or get them ready for college) and be productive.

So far it seems like they are exposed to lots of technology that they will likely be using (Mozzilla and Jira type stuff, CVS and Subversion kind of things, software development cycle, NetBeans, etc...). I believe they use the Sun Academic Initiative Program with courses designed to teach java and prepare you to pass the Sun Certified Associate and Programmer tests.

There were lots of interesting comments (especially from Brett Schuchert and Kris Vanderwater).

Kris is so passionate about drupal (http://drupal.org/) that I'm gonna check it out. It is supposed be like PHP++ and java programmers take to it like ducks to water... we'll see. So far it looks very web centric. I'm used to apps being broken into layers - web - business - dao, etc. It's gotta be easier to read/learn than Ruby & Perl!

Brett talked (a little too long maybe?) about how UML isn't all that useful. But the students should learn enough of it to be able to understand it. Of course he said lots of other good things but I don't think I'll talk about them right now.

The change to the JUG's evening meeting (focus on nerdlings) may be helpful to anyone taking the FT java course and was mentioned a couple of times. I really hope we can get some people to show up for these meetings. It's going to be very flexible (agile?) - no real topics - just what do you want or need to know.

The idea suggested last year to get the students to contribute to an open source project didn't get a very good response. I would think that this would be a very nice thing to have in your resume. Even though you weren't paid for your work, it does show initiative and the ability to apply what you have learned. It would give an interviewer another way to judge whether you will be productive or not.

There were some volunteers (Objectstream/Biju & Brett) to mentor and teach the students which should be a great help to the students.

We all got a nice calculator, a pen, and a pad of paper with the FT logo for our time. Very nice, thanks.

Okc JUG - Evening meetings = Nerdlings

The JUG meetings have really changed this year. Last summer, we started having lunch meetings and evening meetings. Over that last 3 months, the Evening meeting attendance has dropped to around 7 people. And the Lunch meetings have gone from around 15 to over 30. We had 41 people for our March lunch meeting - a new record. We've had to change rooms for the lunch meeting. The new room will hopefully be less crowded.

Because the evening meetings are now so small, we are changing their format starting in May. We will no longer ask the sponsor to provide food or drinks for the evening meeting. We have started to try and get people who are struggling with Java or are new to the language. Basically make it a Java for Newbies kind of meeting. We will have at least 2 people who really know java. We will start around 5:30 or 6:00 and have a short presentation over something simple and then open the meeting up to questions and even work one-on-one with people to help them learn. I doubt we will get much attendance at this meeting until September or October since a lot of newbies (or Nerdlings as I like to call them) are going to be high school or college students. Maybe we'll get some of the Cobol programmers that Hertz is about layoff