Thoughts Electrique

Last week I attended the Yahoo! OpenHack 2009. I had never heard of this event before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have to say: I was very impressed with the event and had a lot of fun.

The event took place at the Millenium Hotel at Times Square and started with some sessions about the Yahoo! technologies. I was most impressed with the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) which enabled a SQL like way to talk to a wide variety of web services. Of course the recently released YUI toolkit looks also very promising. After lunch the hacking space in the 8th floor was opened. The whole space was decorated in Steam Punk fashion which is of courses appealing to us geeks. There was a gaming space (RockBand and Fussball), lots of sofas and a never ending amount of nice food and drinks (I’m talking real food, not just pizza ). They even had some german beer which made me almost feel at home.

The hacking started early and went on the whole night. I won’t go into detail about our project and all the other great hacks (You can look this up on the Yahoo! NYC Open Hack website) but I can assure you it is a lot of fun and you meet great people. There were Yahoo! engineers around to help you with almost every problem. I sure learned a lot during these two days. I wasn’t familiar with any of the Yahoo! technologies and think it’s a shame that people only seem to look at Google and forget that other companies have great stuff too.

On Saturday afternoon the hacks were presented and some prizes were given away. Although I think most of the people were in it for the fun. The ceremony although was great.

If you ever have the opportunity to attend such an event you should definately do it.

I’ll bet at the Yahoo! Open Hack NYC on October the 9th. If anyone has some cool suggestions or want to meet up there just shoot me an email. Seems like a fun thing to do. I’ll report back on this blog what comes out of it.

I’m also working on some projects so stay tuned.

Last Week I attended the JBoss World in Chicago and I had a good time. My favorite Session was Large Clusters in JBoss presented by Bela Ban. It was a very hands-on explanation of the new mod_cluster and presented nicely some of the problems with clustered environments (such as binary incompatible rolling updates, management of configuration files, discovery, etc.) and how to work with them (I always like sessions which keep it down a bit and don’t promote the technology as the next holy grail). I also enjoyed Putting Java to REST by Bill Burke which gave a good introduction to RESTeasy. The library (including the JAX-RS standard) looks very straightforward and easy to comprehend (This is always something which I didn’t like about all the SOA stacks). I must say that I’m a bit skeptical about the announced REST-star initiative. I think it may be a little early to start a standardization effort which will certainly make the technology seem more complex.

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After two days of information overflow the OpenCms days 2009 are finally over. I think they were a success and personally got a lot value out of them.

We had a small get together on Sunday evening with a nice diner and some Kölsch. I think it’s always nice to meet some people before the conference so you can already connect to some people. We stayed out rather long and I was back at the hotel around 3:00 AM, but it was a lot of fun. I had many interesting talks and met a lot of very nice people. If you’re thinking of attending the OpenCms Days 2010, I would really recommend to come on sunday evening so you don’t miss this event.

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From June 15 to 16 the OpenCms Days 2009 are happening in Cologne. I really had a great time last year so for me the decision to go was a no-brainer. Unfortunately I had no time to prepare a session this year but having a quick look at the program tells me it may be better because I can enjoy even more great sessions (doing a session by myself was very exhausting and I only survived it because of Arash Kaffamanesh’s constant water devlivery ) Here are my must-see sessions:

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