Monday, December 9, 2013

A great place to learn and mingle



The Java User Group Bangladesh (JUGBD) is now formed and successfully finished its 2nd meetup in last week. We are doing great, it’s not an exaggeration.

For those who doesn’t know what is JUG, let me brief a little. Java User Groups (JUGs) are basically a group of enthusiastic people who loves java and develop product and service using Java related technology and love to share their knowledge with others. We get together in some place and then talk to each other, eat and have fun.





The primary vision of JUGBD is to continue meeting on very regular basis. As all the people are involved here are too much cool and enthusiastic, it always feels better to talk to each other and learning new things.

In August 2013, we had our first meetup. On this day, we formed the group with a few Java programmers of different software firms and with some students, both of whom were present at the event. Later we decide to have another meetup, which was held on 6th December 2013. This time, we received a huge response from the programmers here in Dhaka, a lot of them were physically present and most of them supported us. We had three speakers at this event. They gave a talk on how Java technology influenced other technology, big data (Cassendra) and JVM diagnostic. All of the talks were excellent.

A lot of software firm are stepping forward to help our events. Meetup 2.0 was sponsored by Therap Services, LLC. In addition, we got our sponsor for the next meetup already, which is really helpful to our community. We greatly appreciate this sort of help.



Right now, we are looking to contribute to some open source projects and thus we are looking for problems, ideas. Here is an open invitation to everybody: if you are a java programmer, enthusiastic about learning new stuff and love to talk about technologies, please join us. It’s a great opportunity for us to learn and mingle.



Thursday, June 27, 2013

Do we have programming freedom ?

There is no such thing as true freedom. This is probably a true realization. As I understand it, freedom means-  minimizing the level of dependence. As a programmer, we love to think that we have a true freedom in the computer, as it seems we can do whatever we want to do. It is true, at least in theory, but in practice, we are simply in the opposite. We think about a problem and make a conceptual design in our mind to solve that particular problem, then select a programming language to implement. This is a typical scenario.

But the problem is to map our conceptual model into the programming language. This is not an easy task to do as we are heavily dependent on programming infrastructure. Sometimes we wait for the language designer to update certain things (we used to joke about Java updates), and if it requires additional power from the IDE, we must wait for the IDE vendor. Most importantly programming language has simple, and few notations that can be expressed in comparison with our natural language. Most of the cases us the programmers spend our time finding ways to express our conceptual model with programming level abstractions which are difficult and not creative and more or less waste of time.

So where is our freedom? Are we not locked in some ways.