JUG with Joshua Bloch

The weekend before the last one I was lucky enough to attend JUG meeting with Josh Bloch invited as a speaker. The event took place in St. Petersburg. It was a bit far away to go for me, but even though I’ve never been a huge fan of Josh Bloch (I read and enjoyed Effective Java :)) I had decided it was worth going and was right.

Josh gave two talks: “More Effective Java” which essentially highlighted some new parts of the 2nd edition of Effective Java and “How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters” talk which had also a lot in common with the Effective Java book. The bad thing for me was that I had read Josh’s book before (including 2nd edition) and I have even watched him giving a talk about good API on the Internet, so I’ve read or heard probably about 98% of content. I don’t mean I know all these things really well, but still it wasn’t exciting. There was a chance to see java-puzzlers with generics but unfortunately everyone voted against it in favor of API speech. Josh Bloch is an excellent and quite articulate speaker so it still was a real pleasure to listen to him. The good side of it is should you be interested in Josh Bloch’s views on how to develop software and pieces of advice, you can read his book (or may be also watch a video) to get the most of it… 98% or so :)

The most surprising for me was how everything except the speech itself went. First off, it was Josh Bloch setting up his (well.. Google’s) laptop and projector totally on his own sometimes crawling among the chairs. It’s by no means a complaint about organization of the event, it’s just was quite different from what I had expected or seen on MS events. Another thing was that there was almost no excitement about Josh Bloch, although, he was very friendly readily posing for photographs and singing books. After the speeches there were not more than 20 people out of more than 100 who decided to join the dinner and at most 7 of them who were talking or listening to Josh. For me it was the best part where everyone could ask any questions and as many of them as they would like. I admit I wasn’t prepared and didn’t have interesting technical questions :( Still it was a great experience to see in details what the man who influenced java-world a great deal thinks, what values has. It can be found “offline” but real-life experience is much better and it surely changed my understanding of Josh Bloch’s writings and made me think how geeky I got over the last few years.

These are The Only Really Important Answers ;) I got (reproduced as I remembered them):

Q: What IDE do you use?

A: In our team at Google we use IntelliJ, so it’s IntelliJ. I haven’t used other IDEs a lot.

Q: What OS do you use?

A: We use Ubuntu at Google. I have several XP boxes at home and I used to have Mac. I hate all OS equally :)