I’m just back from a fantastic time in Wellington, New Zealand, where I was doing some Grails training and speaking duties for Asia/Pacific User Group of SunGardHE. Wellington is a very beautiful place (albeit a little cold - and I live in a cold place!) and the local hosting team of Andrew/Dale/Keiryn where just fantastic in sorting everything out!
On the first day I had a chance to speak with around 100 managers on the benefits of Grails (it was quite a challenge putting together a Grails talk targetted to a non-technical audience!). We covered off three big ideas:
- What is Grails?
- Why do people choose Grails? (and who has already moved there)
- How do I transition my team to Grails? (in their case, from Oracle PL/SQL)
Then I couldn’t resist doing a small Grails demo where we built a conference registration app with evolving requirements, then skinned it with the APSUG logo and colours. Even though the crowd was largely non-technical, they were right into the live coding demo! That was a real eye opener. I think people really enjoy things being created before their eyes (whether that’s live painting or live coding!).
The other thing they really resonated with was the whole concept of Yak Shaving. For a lot of them, they relate the whole idea of convention-over-configuration to a reduction in Yak Shaving - something which had a clear mental model for them!
The second day we ran a code camp for around 10 of the university developers from the conference. SunGard had put together some great training materials to work through, which I couldn’t resist tweaking a little for the local crowd!
One of the coolest parts of the day was when Bob Rullo from SunGardHE in the States skyped in and took the students through the actual SunGardHE source code for the commercial Grails app they’ll be customising for their own universities. The students were so jazzed to see the same type of Grails Domain Classes and Services that they’d be tinkering with during the camp.
Big thank you to all the folk who brought me over (particularly Victoria University of Wellington), and the great students in the code camp who had to do a little Yak Shaving around the “perfect storm” of Grails 1.3.7, Java 7 and Gemfire! We even prototyped a “grails yak-shave” command to keep us focussed!
Oh. And if you even get to Wellington, make sure you head over to Wellington Zoo to catch the Kiwi Hut and the extremely cute brown kiwis. Those Kiwis are a really awesome and distinctive native animal!
Oh. And I also had a great time catching up with NZ Grails champs @pragmaticgeek @wakaleo @nigel_charman. Looks like we might get a few of the NZ boys over for the GR8 conf that looks like happening in Canberra on Nov 14. Can’t wait!