Behold The Geeks!

So, I went to the Desert Code Camp hosted by DeVry university today. It was awesome. 8 Hours with 60+ classes composed of the distilled knowledge of some of the best developers in the area.

A Special Thanks DeVry and all the organizer and presenters that made it possible! – It rocked! (The Free Food and T-Shirt were nice too btw…)

See the Geeks?
Here’s a quick overview of the classes I attended.

Continuous Integration With Continuum

by: Wendy Smoak – An Apache Continuum Comitter

• USE Continuous Integration
• It saves time.
• Ensure some motivation (preferably public humiliation by the team) is in place when someone “breaks the build”
• Continuum is EASY to setup (download the tarball, run bin/continuum.sh (or .bat) start (if on windows, continuum.bat install first) Then add your project
• It’s best to do an automated build for every commit (either have Continuum poll the svn server, or setup an svn post commit hook to fire it off)
• Continuum is very tightly integrated with Maven2
• If you send out build failure notifications, put the addresses in continuum instead of the pom, because if they are in the pom, and other people download your code and build it witn continuum and don’t change the POM you get their build failure notifications.
• There are many other CI choices other then Continuum, use something!

Domain Driven Design

by: Don Weinmann

Very cool session with lots of cool ideas. The whole idea of Aggregates was new to me. I wish I could sum it up here… But it was very in depth, view below links if your interested in learning more.

• Aggregate Boundaries
• Aggregate Roots
  • All other objects must go THROUGH the Aggregate Root to get an object.
• Repository’s – A RUD service that you use to get objects.
• Spawners – Like a factory, but a method that’s a member of an Aggregate Root

Understanding functional programming

by: Chris Chandler

No, Jeremy’s not disillusioned… Functional Programming is really cool and has very practical applications. Namely reliability and concurrency… YAWS (a websever written in erlang) can handle 80,000 concurrent connections. Whereas apache chokes at about 4,000. Rumered to be the webserver that powers facebook. The telecom industry makes extensive use of functional programming as well.

This was also the first I had heard of Scala, a functional language built on the Java JVM.

Getting started with Arduino

by: Brian Shaler

• Like PIC but open source.
• Integrates with almost anything.
  • Ultrasonic range finders.
  • Light Sensors
  • etc…

USB Control with JAL and C#

by: Aaron Cure
You can get an 18F2455 Microchip (made by Microchip) and with five extra components connect it to a USB port and interact with it from C# (this means controlling all 16 of the I/O pins as well as accessing an analog input.) You do have to burn an initial image to the chip, BUT! Once you burn the initial image, you can reload the code on the device via the usb port without needing a sperate flasher. Code for the chip, and code to get you started on LOTS of PIC projects can be found in the JALlib.

• Totally Awesome!
• Use a TRIac to control AC current with it.
• Use it for anything.
• Build a red light green light broken build indicator to work with you CI server.