Joakim Andersson

A short list of the things and sessions that stand out in my memory after spending two days at Jfokus 2011 last week.

The venue was amazing. Ever since working at bwin, with offices in the house on the other side of the road from the new Waterfront building, and looking out over the construction site while having lunch on the balcony I’ve been skeptical to the construction of the Stockholm Waterfront building. But even though I might not like the exterior design, the venue worked great for the Jfokus conference. The rooms were great and the exhibition/lunch/coffee area was big enough to not get too crowded with over 1100 people moving around.

The WiFi worked now and then as expected. It’s amazing how hard it can be to provide a working wireless network for a tech conference. But when it worked the #jfokus hashtag on twitter was where the action was.

If I would select one session per day that I especially enjoyed it would be “Physics in Android games” by Pär Sikö and Martin Gunnarsson on day one.

See More Angry Birds Various at IGN.com

They showed how easy it is to integrate a physics engine with a 2D library on Android using the free AndEngine framework by creating a simple Angry Birds lookalike called “Angry Nerds” in like 100 lines of code. Very impressive.

On day two the “Future-proofing collections: from mutable to persistent to parallel” session by Martin Odersky naturally stood out from the rest as I’ve recently become a Scala fan-boy.

If you like Scala you just had to go to the session with the creator of the language and he didn’t fail to deliver. During the very interesting 50 minutes he told us how we will need to make use of parallel computing to use the full potential of the future processors, and how functional programming in Scala makes that easy.

I would also like to mention Neal Ford’s closing keynote “Abstraction Distractions” which was thoughtful and enjoyable even though I had to leave early. Hopefully I can watch the rest when the video recordings are released.

To summarize my first JFokus, I’m very satisfied. The organizers (and @matkar in particular) did a terrific job getting good speakers with interesting content. If you were not there you missed out!