Get the Inside Scoop on SD West 2008

Paul Tyma, SD West advisory board member and Software Engineer at Google, sat down with us to discuss SD West 2008 and the latest industry trends.

Are there new and noteworthy trends in your particular area of expertise?
PT: In the Java space, we're particularly excited about contributions to the language and environment in several areas. It's been a long time since we've seen such a sparked debate as the potential introduction of closures in Java (attend Neal Gafter's talk for the story from the horse's mouth). Interestingly, the concurrency model of Java is very mature, and in fact was ahead of the now common paradigm of multicore computing. One theme you'll see in the Java track is that if you're not developing for multicore, you're missing out in a big way.

What is most exciting about SD West's course offerings this year?
PT: This past year has marked the transition of several technologies from being cutting-edge to commodity. This included (to varying degrees) things like XML, J2EE, and application servers. This has opened the way for the next wave of new technology, such as existing language evolution (java closure), Ruby, map-reduce, and commercial storage solutions. The SD West conference has kept pace with these changes and covers some important aspects of all the newer technologies. It's an exciting time to be in the software industry.

What are your "must-see" course recommendations?
PT:
* Neal Gafter's "Closures Cookbook" class
* Josh Bloch's "Effective Java Reloaded" covering the next edition of the his book.
* Scott Meyers speaking about -- well, anything -- go see Scott, you can't go wrong.

What's the number one reason people should attend SD West?
PT: SD West represents one of the few options to learn about the software industry's cutting-edge trends. SD West is the best collection of new technology talks, often given by the technology inventors or book authors themselves. The return-on-investment for any software developer is extremely high.

Check out all the Advisory Board interviews here.