Session 3 - JP Boodhoo
JP starts out by apologizing to the person who felt he was arrogant yesterday (someone put that for his feedback yesterday). I found it kind of funny that JP was so arrogant that he just assumed the person was in the room (kidding JP... I know you were sincere)

JP is taking a crappy website and doing some refactoring to patterns. Our first refactoring is going to be moving to the passive view... no heads explode. We just jump through MVP quite fast and I think a few people got really lost but JP is making the whole presentation available via a screencast so hopefully people will be able to watch the talk at their own pace. JP did the passive view which I have not done yet so it was good to see how that was build and how to test it.

Unfortunately my laptop battery died so it ended my note taking. It was really nice to go to a JP talk and not feel totally overwhelmed so either I go to too many JP talks or my coding skills are getting better.

Session 5 - Oren Eini
Oren is doing a talk today on monorail. Monorail is an MVC (Model View Controller) implementation on top of the .NET framework. It really keeps a good separation of tasks by breaking views and controls to separate code just by the structure of the code. It also breaks every task on a page (i.e. show,edit, delete, etc.) into separate files which keeps the code clean (but the solution gets a little messy but a good folder structure can alleviate that).

Oren is a really fast and knowledgeable presenter. At one point someone asked if Oren liked Brail over nVelocity. Oren's response was "I rote Brail" so that was good for a laugh.

Here are my notes on creating a hello world app in monorail:
-Create a control that inherits from SmartDispatchController
-Implement our index() method
-Creates an index.brail in the /views/Home folder
-puts in Hello world into the index.brail file and runs it... one jackass claps (but it was funny)
-sets up PropertyBag["name"] = "oren"; in the controller
-on index.brail he put "hello ${name}" and it shows his name

I definitely need to spend some time and learn monorail. Looks pretty powerful to me

Session 6 - Rob Daigneau
Rob's giving a talk today on Anti-patterns today. I was expecting the talk on software anti-patterns but it was actually people/behavioral anti-patters. It was a pretty good talk discussing a lot of the people/organizational issues we run into and dealing with those problems appropriately. We went pretty fast to take good notes but the slide deck is available so that might be good to review.

My favorite quote was about the perfectionist developer. His app's are "Apocalypse-Ready": even if the end of the world happens the software will still function.

A good book recommend also came out of this talk: Gerald Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting