Need more meat!

Tom and I skipped breakfast at the convention hall and ate at the hotel instead. If I'm going to break with my normal routine and actually eat breakfast, there had better be bacon involved.

Installing the DiamondBack stuff in the background as I type this. I've got an hour or so break, since I had no desire to see the Java keynote.

My first session of the day was entitled "Automating Code Reviews". Sounds pretty cool, eh? Well, my first impressions weren't good, as the presenter showed up five minutes late. Then, he lead off with a 30 minute spiel on what code reviews are and why they're important. I'm sorry, but if you give your talk the title "Automating Code Reviews", you should assume that your audience had done code reviews and recognized the need for some automation. This talk was another sign that the conference committee needs to more closely regulate their level structure. It was listed as "advanced", and we barely even touched on the tools.

The speaker also didn't field questions well. One user expressed displeasure that the JBuilder wizard generated code, unmodified, does not pass the default metrics and audits in Together. The speaker kept thinking the user was complaining about Together, when in reality it's the JBuilder guys who need to tighten up their wizard code (eat their own dog food, etc.). Another person asked if Together would support annotating a block/method/file to tell the audits and metrics to skip that code for a particular test. For example, ignore for a given method that it has too many parameters, because we have manually examined it, blessed it, and don't need the tool reminding us every time about it. The speaker kept saying, "Well, you could disable the rule," and "You can adjust the boundary conditions of the rule," but those changes apply across the project. He never quite got it.

In retrospect, I wish I had gone to Danny Thorpe's talk on new features in the Delphi compiler instead. (Tom expressed some interest in seeing what would happen if you put Danny and Bob B into a room together and asked them to design a compiler. Sounds fun to me!)