Upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff conference

John McCaffrey, Friday, November 2, 2007 @ 4:28 pm

The Great Lakes Software Symposium (aka No Fluff Just Stuff) is coming to Chicago November 16-18th, and if you are a java/ajax/agile developer or manager you should really check it out. I went for the first time last year and it was great. With the amount of relevant and interesting sessions they have, I could have gone to the Milwaukee one the next week and still not made it to every session I wanted to.

  Why is it good?

1. No Fluff, Duh! - This means there are no B.S. artists there trying to pitch their half-baked, proprietary, "silver-bullet", junk.
2. Best of the Best - the people that present are top-notch practitioners, and more importantly top-notch, well practiced presenters. (Its one thing to be a smart guy who knows how to write great code, but to present it and really "Teach" the audience is a different skill set)
3. Fair price- Compared to other conferences, the NFJS series is very reasonably priced (particularly because its close by). Also a $100 discount for alumni!! combine that with the early registration
   deal (which has passed already for this year), and you are down to a
   very good price.
4. Great networking - I've seen a fair amount of some of Chicago's finest developers at NFJS, and found it to be a great way to meet people from other companies (its good to find out which companies sponsor the cost, and which ones don't)
5. Relevant topics - The latest on Ajax, Agile, Spring/AOP, Groovy, Ruby/Rails, and overall development best practices.
6. Door prizes - last year a friend of mine won an Ipod. This year they have more iPods, iPhones, Sony PS3.

All in all its a good conference at a good price, and even in the cases where it covers a topic you know well, there are always good things that come out of the discussion. There is a cool energy in the air when you go to a conference like this. Amazing ideas are thrown around, groups of people huddle around a laptop trying out new ideas, and you leave the place really excited about development and eager to try out some new ideas.

Hope to see you there!
-John

agile ajax

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