One of the highlights of the conference was the keynote ­ "Introduction to Pragmatic Programming" by Dave Thomas. This session showed the inefficiencies in today's software development practices and what could be done about them. We experience the same problems today that we had back in the 1970s and '80s. Projects are still late, underfeatured, over budget, and full of bugs. Dave cited an NIST study that showed how the U.S. wastes $60 billion each year on buggy software. Since there are about 3­4 million developers in this country, each developer costs the U.S. economy roughly $20K each year ­ ouch!

Pragmatic programming fits somewhere between methodologies and technology-specific skills. It is not a methodology; it's about the individuals and teams who produce software. Pragmatic programming breaks down into three practice areas: individual, technical, and team.

The most distinctive feature was the section on individual practices:

Speaker Interaction
The speakers were personable and helpful. After presenting on "Effective Enterprise Java: Systems," Ted Neward spent a long time with me discussing ClassLoaders, their relationship to the JVM, and how this relates to Singletons in a J2EE environment. In between sessions, Sue Spielman spoke with me about the ups and downs of writing a technical book, and compared being a solo author to working with other authors. During breakfast, Bruce Tate gave me ideas on how to become more marketable in today's challenging IT economy. After one of his JAAS presentations, Maciej Zawadzki provided the inside scoop on Urbancode's EJB Benchmark ­ he created a series of benchmarks to prove to his clients that Entity EJBs were needlessly slow, and that alternate solutions would perform and scale better.

Conclusion
When I asked attendees for their opinions of the conference, the consensus was:

Since I learned so much in just one weekend, I would recommend an NFJS conference to any developer, architect, or technical manager looking to keep up with the latest trends and improve their skills. I plan to attend this conference when it returns to Denver in the fall because the NFJS symposium series truly lives up to its billing ­ "No Fluff, Just Stuff."