no fluff

I have a personal goal to not post with apologies regarding my lack of posting, sadly this may veer distressingly close to that line…

Interesting things have been happening in our lives, I just haven’t had a lot of time to pull together posts on such.

Things eating into my time include the fact that our church is in the process of moving to a new location. The new location just needs a near total demolition and remodel before we can move! I have had the opportunity to smash drywall and disassemble an industrial grade HVAC system that has been hanging from the ceiling for several decades 🙂

Most recently I spent the weekend at a Java developers conference here in Des Moines commonly referred to as “No Fluff”

The event lets you pack about eleven 90-minute sessions plus a keynote and some breakout time into a single weekend. The majority of the sessions I attended were what you could call information dense. I learned a lot about subjects as specific as Spring configuration, as “hey look how cool this is” as a tech-demo of Spock or Ratpack, or as theoretical as a talk entitled “The complexity of complexity.” I can honestly say every single session was worth my time to attend.

While I can’t begin to pass along what I gleaned from the sessions, I can share a video made by a speaker and MC of the event. I don’t know how much context will help this make sense, but “Maven” is a tool used by programmers to automate the process of taking all the little pieces of code and “building” them into an actual program. It’s a useful tool, but like most tools in this space it has it’s detractors.

-Jordan

Well, maybe backlogged is a better word.

And actually, I feel like I am starting to catch back up now, but I felt pretty overloaded earlier this week… Might have had something to do with my taking so long to get this post up.

I spent the past weekend at the “No Fluff Just Stuff” conference. It was really good, but doing ten 90 minute sessions in a weekend left me feeling a little numb. The sessions were without a doubt non-fluffy. I learned a lot, but it was probably more than I could really absorb.

The last session I went to “Hacking your brain for fun and profit” while non-technical has been the easiest to start using. It covered ways to make yourself smarter/more productive. First up: getting more sleep. I don’t know if I can keep it up, but I really felt like I should try harder to stay on top of that one. The next point I tried to apply was avoiding distractions at work. I now have all my “new e-mail” sounds turned off, instant messenger can’t make noise ether, and my toolbar is set to auto hide. After nearly a week of that, I think I can tell that it is easier to focus on a task.

As sort of a byproduct of that, I found that Eclipse seems to prevent the taskbar from popping back up like it should sometimes, leading me to look into ways to improve task-switching. I hear there have been some great improvements in operating systems over the past… eight years or so, but my place of employ is still using XP so most of the cool things I initially found weren’t going to work.

Eventually I found out Microsoft labs had a product “Alt-Tab Replacement” in their Power Toys for Windows XP collection. It isn’t perfect, but it improved my situation fairly drastically.

And, that little tip is probably only useful to me… but hey the subscription was cheap right? 🙂

A (nearly) free weekend coming up, can’t wait to see what Heather and I end up filling it with!

-Jordan

Java!

My Brain Is Full!