Dave Thomas at YOW! Nights Brisbane
Two nights ago I was fortunate enough to attend a YOW! Nights conference held at the local Microsoft Office here in Brisbane. The speaker for the session was none other than Dave Thomas, the man behind the likes of ObjectMentor. Not only is this guy incredibly switched on, he is thought-provoking and very entertaining to boot. I've been to a few of these sessions in the past but I've never seen one as packed out as this one. It was great to see such a turn-out, which no doubt was boosted by the presence of both the Queensland MSDN Users Group and the Brisbane Functional Programming Group.
The talk was covering Functional Programming and the NoSQL movement (which, as Dave himself puts it, should be called NoRDB). These are two areas of computing that are currently key interests of mine, so it won't come as a surprise to find that I thoroughly enjoyed the talk. I certainly wasn't the only one. Dave did such a great job of covering the positives of these two movements that we're already seeing more and more people signing up for membership to BFPG.
I'm not going to go into the gory details about what Dave covered in his talk as I don't want to spoil it for other people if he plans on doing it again elsewhere. There are a few things I would like to mention though:
- Functional Programming is here to stay. If you're not familiar with it, or haven't yet taken a look at it, I suggest you get started!
- If you're looking to get involved with FP and you're in or around the Brisbane area, be sure to come to one of our BFPG meetups.
- Don't fall into the trap of assuming that if your system needs a back-end data store that an RDBMS is the only option, because it's not!
This talk has inspired me to not only continue checking out the likes of Haskell, Erlang and Riak, it's pointed me at some languages that I never knew existed. Languages which are insanely powerful, very dense, yet still extremely useful. Some examples are J, K and Q. KDB+ in particular is very interesting as it ties in with the use of another type of technology that I was aware of but knew nothing about: Column Databases. Crazy stuff.
After seeing so many people excited by the prospect of Functional Programming after Dave's talk had concluded, I decided to set up a new website for BFPG so that we had a proper home rather than just a spot on Meetup.com. Check it out and feel free to send through some feedback if you have any, or drop us a line if you have any ideas for talks or would like to present something yourself.
That's it for today's brain-fart 
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