Brisbane JAOO - Tutorials Day 1

So today was my first day at JAOO. And I loved it. I attended two vey good tutorials: Rebbeca Wirfs-Brock's The Art of Telling Your Design Story and "Uncle" Bob's "Advanced Principles of Agile Object Oriented Class and Component Design. Both presenters were engaging and definitely knew their subjects.

From the first tutorial, the key point was figuring out what to remove from a story to help more effectively get your point across to your audience. There were a lot of good points across the tutorial and good information that can be used beyond just telling a design story.

I really did enjoy the second tutorial. Bob is animated, full of energy and happy to digress slightly into entertaining and informative rants. He's completely shattered (in a good way) my view on OO modeling and the "is-a" and "has-a" relationships with excellent concrete examples. He gave us solid categorizations for defining problems with software designs. He made us reconsider what OO really means and I now have some interesting metrics to take back to our team to analyze the state of our codebase. Not to mention the design patterns he has for encouraging good design and fending off software rot. If I have some time and motivation in the future, I'll go into a lot more detail of what I learned from this tutorial.

Oh, and being in the same room with the likes of "Uncle" Bob, Micheal Feathers and Martin Fowler, I'm really enjoying it...