JavaCampParis 4th edition

Yesterday was the 4th edition of JavaCampParis. It was a great event in a great place (Google’s offices in Paris). I must say that after a very boring Scrum User Group, this was a real change.

For those of you not familiar with JavaCamps, it’s an open space driven event. There is no such thing as speakers or pre-build agenda. Almost every talks are many to many open talks and the subjects are listed by the attendees at the very beginning. Here is the subject board that we came up with.

Very broad subjects but which leaded to interesting discussions. I went first to the cloud computing session and then to the TDD session and managed a shameless plug about JUnitMax on both sessions ;-).

Talking about cloud computing, I must say that there is something big going on. It reminds me the beginning of the web: we all knew each day that it was going to be big one day when, in fact, it was already bigger and bigger everyday. Same thing is happening with the cloud. We think it will be big one day when in fact it is already huge and at the same time very small compared to what we’ll have in only a few weeks (eight days?).

Let’s face it, if like me you are using MobileMe, Dropbox, GMail, GReader, Twitter, Google Apps, EveryNote, you are already very much in the cloud. Think about what’s left on you computer harddrive. Not very much. I guess: iTunes library, photos, a few videos and a few legacy apps. The very same data that you still need to copy on your iPhone flash memory because the cloud is there yet. All of which will quickly move out of your machine to be available from any device, anywhere. Great!

This talk was the opportunity for Nicolas and me to draw the picture of our dream, cloud connected, IDE. More on this in a later post…

I also attended to the TDD session where I presented JUnitMax. We then talked about adopting Agile practices and combining Agile and Fixed Price Contracts. It reminds me my years at Valtech :-) Very pleasing was the fact that so many young people are practicing TDD nowadays. I was very surprised. Happily.

All in all, it was a very good evening that ended in endless talks with the usual suspects : Didier, Jean-laurent, Nicolas, Eric and more.