I will be speaking at JAOO 2009, talking about advanced OR/M techniques and giving a tutorial about Rhino Mocks.

I spoke at JAOO 2007, and had a great time there. The content was superb and the attendees and the crew were great. I remember sitting at a session with Joe Armstrong talking about Erlang and finally getting things that were annoying just beyond my grasp, and that was one of several sessions that left me wanting more.

You can actually watch me and Hammett’s session about Active Record in JAOO 2007.

This year, there are two things that I am looking forward to in JAOO.

Probably the most important one is that JAOO is giving free tickets for women, which hopefully help us avoid the token female per conference, which seems to be the rule.

There are women in IT, I know because I have met quite a few of them (the best coworker and the best project manager that I had the pleasure of working with where women). Hopefully this will get more of them into more visible spots.

The second, of course, is the content. For a change, I actually have the time to attend most of the sessions that I want to see. I’ll probably change my mind at least a few more times, but here is my current list of session I plan to be at:

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code 2 - Michael Feathers
  I loved working effectively with legacy code, and I consider it the inspiration for Rhino Mocks. (I got to tell Michael Feathers that I “blame” him for Rhino Mocks in NDC 2009, priceless!)
• Evolving the Key/Value programming model to a higher level - Billy Newport
  I am quite interested in the no-sql databases, and this looks to be a good way to learn more about key / value pairs.
• CouchDB from 3,333km - Jan Lehnardt
  And, of course, I really like CouchDB. One of those days I am going to get a sponsor to finish Divan DB, too :-)
• Enterprise Architecture, Top 10 Mistakes - Eoin Woods
  Searched and Found - Fulltext search with Hibernate - Hardy Ferentschik
  Those two run in parallel, but unfortunately I’ll have to choose and pick. The first one sounds funny, the second one is interesting because I did a lot of work on the port of NHibernate Search, full text searching for NHibernate.
• Buy it, Build it, Download It, or Browse It? Achieving Effectiveness with Enterprise Applications - Michael T. Nygard
  No idea what this is about, but Michael Nygard (who I hope will never have to hear my trying to pronounce his last name) is someone I want to hear.
• Object Relational Mapping += 2: More than just data <-> object - Oren Eini
  Engineering in Five Dimensions - Michael T. Nygard
  This is another problematic timing issue. I wonder if I can send Ayende to listen to Michael and have Oren give the presentation.
• Distributed Programming the Google Way - Gregor Hohpe
  And this ties back to my interest in distributed computing. Should be interesting

All in all, I hope to see you there.