It’s sunday and I am fed up, sitting lazy behind my computer and taking a review of the last week. I attended two conferences this week so I am full of new ideas (don’t know if they are good yet) and wan’t to take a closer look on so many topics.

The first conference was the next conference in Berlin which was initiated some years a go by my former employer SinnerSchrader. So the focus of the next conference was mixture of brand, media, entrepreneurship and technology. Due to the fact that I meet a couple of former colleagues - some of them still working for SinnerSchrader.

The second conference was the Developer Conference Hamburg 2011 which had a sole technology focus. I heard couple of very good talks on both conferences. My highlight was the the keynote of Werner Vogels the CTO of Amazon which spoke about the analysis of big dataset which are regularly produced by modern IT infrastructures. If you generate a couple of gigabytes of data every day you should get the information out of them.

Another highlight of both conferences where the Couch DB talks. Both held by Jan Lehnhardt, one of the Couch DB core commiters who works for Couchbase. Jan can talk very fast in his talks, especially when he had some coffee :-). But there is no bull*** and he definitely knows what he is talking about. Because I attended the next and the devcon I was able to get a 10.000m overview and a 100m close look on the Couch DB. I am very fascinated by this topic, but I have at the moment no idea where to use it.

A dilemma what Couch DB shares with node.js. I heard of node on both conference too. On the next node.js was presented by Isaac Z. Schlueter. The topic was how node.js performs on DIRT (data intensive real time) applications. At devcon node.js was presented by Felix Geisendörfer which gave a more wide range overview on the capabilites of node.js. Unfortunately my current employer does at the moment some kind of “boring” ;-) e-commerce stuff, so no real use for node here. Some SinnerSchrader guys had a very innovative idea using node building the The World’s First Digital Foosball Table - nice one!

But the most influencing talks where from Prof. Dr. Friedrich Esser from the HAW Hamburg about Scala. The talk and the workshops where full of snappy remarks on Java programming language. I am doing Java for over ten years now. And I am confident that I am pretty good at Java and it was my favorite language the last ten years. But in the recent time I am feeling bored by Java and it’s very tight restrictions. We’ll see where the journey goes with this Scala stuff.

On the other hand side there were also some talks - which we presented brilliantly - that where about stuff that I am doing for a couple of year now. One of these was the “Abstract monitoring” talk from Dr. Johannes Mainusch from Xing. Very nice talk, I agree 100% but I was also doing this since 2005. Good to see that other developers are cooking with water too ;-)

But the last week reminded me of the gap what we have at the moment and what I am supposed to close as soon as possible. But now I am armed with some new ideas …