Last weekend I attended JRubyConf 2009. Overall I enjoyed the opening JRubyConf State of the Union, the follow-up JRuby on Rails, and the concluding JRuby Core Team Panel sessions the best. Despite browsing the JRuby mailing list as part of my daily routine, JRuby has a rapid development cycle; these sessions helped me get a clearer view of the JRuby team's current development goals.

I am curious when and how JRuby will take advantage of the invokedynamic and method handle technologies coming with the next Java platform release. After reading John Rose's paper Bytecodes meet Combinators: invokedynamic on the JVM, it sounds like language implementors will need to make a significant development investment if they want to fully utilize the new features. Charles clearly has a strong grasp on the new features. He's already tried out and given feedback on them, so I'm sure he'll be on the forefront of an implementation changeover. Still, I wonder what kind of timeframe we're looking at to go from the simulated method dispatching we have now to a fully fleshed out invokedynamic-backed implementation.

November has been a month of conferences for AO. First, there was GLSEC (Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference), an event put on by SoftwareGR (formerly XP West Michigan) dedicated to improving the competitiveness of Michigan’s software development community. In addition to our involvement with GLSEC, the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving have seen six atoms attend five different conferences, from JRubyConf in San Francisco to the World Bank conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

A surprisingly small number of developers ever get to actually meet the end users of their software. Even at Atomic, with small teams and direct customer contact with the team, it’s not so common that we meet, much less observe, the actual people who consume the software we build. Chad Fowler makes the point that closing this loop is a critical part of software craftsmanship.

I had this opportunity last week. Our customer, the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank Group), held a partners conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Local partners of the SME Toolkit came from all over the developing world to train on the new features in the Toolkit, share their stories, and make suggestions for future features.

Hearing the stories from the partners of how the Toolkit helps their local SMEs was inspirational—there’s a lot of leverage in this project, and it’s one I’m particularly proud to be part of. (Receiving all the compliments on our team’s work is always fun, too, and a nice payback for the 15+ hour plane flights.) I’m returning to work inspired by the great people I met, excited to help specify new features, and proud of the work we do to support the Toolkit.

AO devs Dustin Tinney and Drew Colthrop participated in Grand Rapids GiveCamp this weekend, a volunteer event in which developers lend their skills to area nonprofits. This year 125 volunteers from all over the Midwest came to the Downtown YMCA to work with 23 nonprofits. A combination of local and national businesses sponsored the event, including AO’s neighbors – Brick Road Pizza and Sandmanns.

Dustin worked with C-snip, a low-cost veterinary outfit specializing in spaying and neutering pets. C-snip currently receives thousands of calls a day from area pet owners seeking their services; each call can take up to fifteen minutes because of a detailed questionnaire. Dustin’s team created a web application that would streamline this questionnaire process and free up valuable resources for C-snip. You can see the page they created here.

Drew worked for Friends of Grand Rapids Parks, a grass-roots movement to preserve and enhance area parks and other public spaces. He added park-specific pages to their website that will feature photos from their Flickr pools and convenient Google maps of the parks.

In order to develop deliverable software, the volunteer teams needed to take on projects of the appropriate scope. For Drew and Dustin, their experience of working in short iterations and delivering the most essential features first came in handy. Dustin and Drew commented that the project management was very similar to what we do at AO: “We’re used to working on small stories, working closely with the clients, and receiving constant feedback.”