On the first day of the YOW conference, I was pretty excited about the post lunch session (even after eating a delicious lamb kebab). The two topics that I was very interested in were NoSQL by Justin Sheehy and Strategic Design by Eric Evans.

So off I traipsed into the NoSQL talk, eager about some new news on things like CouchDB, MongoDB and maybe a bit about Mongoid. It certainly was not what I expected. The first half was passionate analysis of what exactly NoSQL is, and more importantly, how we should choose it! The second half of the talk focussed on Riak and I confess uptil today, I had no idea what it was. From there it was a bite more interesting to see actually how Riak worked and how scalability and extensibility were inbuilt into it. Not sure I will be using it anytime soon, but good to know me thinks.

Out I came from this one and went to hear the Strategic Design talk. It was a very well constructed talk on how the best of motives could lead the best of developers astray by setting wrong goals and the drive to never make a compromise. And also metaphors are slightly evil . But the talk was worth listening to, as it demonstrated how refactoring needs to be targeted and how to get business on your side to sponsor the things you think they won’t agree to. Eric demonstrated how models can be extracted in different forms by using a poem, a map and a quote as example domains. It was pretty instructive. Looking back at some of the work I have been doing at personally and some work we have been doing at REA, I would definitely say that we have implemented a fair number of said strategic ideals, especially for the latter body of work.

And that pleases me 🙂

Tomorrow, is the last day of YOW 2010 and I am excited about a devops session amongst others.