Pictured above: The scene at MIX10 after the Day 2 Keynote.

Whether you’ve just come back home from SxSWi, are heading back home from MIX10 or expect to go to a conference sometime soon, you want to make sure that it was worth the ducats you or your company spent sending you there. It’s one thing to come back from a conference, all inspired to try out the ideas you picked up, test drive the new technologies showcased and stay in touch with the people you met, but it’s an entirely different thing to follow through.

Web Worker Daily has an article titled How to Make a Conference Pay Off that provides these tips on how to get the most out of the conference you just attended after you’ve arrived back home (be sure to read the article for expanded versions of these pointers!):

1. Review your content – the notes, business cards, literature and so on.
2. Act on the quick “now” items.
3. Schedule the “now” items that take more time.
4. Check for information posted online.
5. Complete the tasks from step 3.
6. Follow up with the people who promised to contact. Don’t underestimate the strength of weak ties!
7. Study the materials. It is why you picked them up in the first place, isn’t it?
8. Write blog posts or articles. Sometimes the best way to cement what you’ve learned is to share what you’ve learned.

Also worth checking out: A Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In case you missed it or weren’t able to attend, here’s the recording of the MIX10 Day 1 keynote featuring Scott Guthrie talking Silverlight and Joe Belfiore talking Windows Phone 7:

(You can also download the video in high-quality WMV format.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Actually, from left to right, it’s me, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade and Microsoft’s Glenn Block, whom John Bristowe and I interviewed in the most recent Ignite Your Coding webcast. Ward and Glenn have forgotten more about building composite apps than I will ever learn. If you attended the “Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight” session in my track at TechDays Canada 2009, you saw what was essentially Ward’s presentation; he’s the only reason I know anything about Prism.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Whenever you do anything where money changes hands, from getting cash from the ATM to buying anything – movie tickets, groceries, a new pair of shoes or a new car to booking a flight and hotel room, chances are that there’s some Microsoft technology involved. It could be an SQL Server database, an app written in Visual Studio, a site living on IIS or Azure or a business process powered by SharePoint, and more likely than not, someone was using Office as well. From devices that fit in your pocket to cavernous data centres, the Microsoft platform helps millions of people across a broad spectrum of industries get real work done every day.

Want to know what’s possible with the Microsoft-based platform? Want to know how it all fits together? That’s what the EnergizeIT 2010 tour is for. In March and April, we’re visiting 20 cities across Canada – as far west as Victoria and as far east as St. John’s – to host free local gatherings where we show you how you can take advantage of our tools and technology to drive your business and your career.

EnergizeIT will comprise different sorts of events in different cities, all of which are listed below.

The “From the Client to the Cloud” Full-Day Events
(Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal)

In Canada’s six largest cities, we’ll hold our EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud full-day events, where we’ll cover the Microsoft-based platform in detail. And yes, even though it’s full-day, it’ll still be free!

In the morning, we’ll talk about the big picture. We’ll show you a scenario featuring the Microsoft-based platform as seen from different points of view: the customer, the information worker, the developer and the IT professional. You’ll see our latest and greatest as well as our up-and-coming developer goodies: Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. We’ll show you Windows 7 and Azure in action, talk about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and tell you how all of Microsoft’s stuff works together.

Just as the morning session answers the question “What’s the latest technology?”, the afternoon sessions answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from where I am now?” These sessions, split into two tracks – one on infrastructure management and deployment, one on the development process – will cover what you can do with our tools and technology in a little more depth. They’ll show you what you need to implement what you saw in the morning session and provide a roadmap you can follow to learn more and take action.

For more details about From the Client to the Cloud events or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud page.

The “Community Connection” Evening Events
(Many Cities Across Canada)

We’ll also hold Community Connection events in the evening in many cities across Canada, where we’ll do the “big picture” session (the morning session) of our From the Client to the Cloud events.

The Community Connection evening events will take place in the following cities:

• British Columbia: Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria
• Alberta: Edmonton and Calgary
• Saskatchewan: Regina and Saskatoon
• Manitoba: Winnipeg
• Ontario: Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Mississauga
• Quebec: Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières
• Atlantic Canada: Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton and Fredericton

For more details about Community Connection or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Community Connection page.

Office 2010 Installfests
(Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, Mississauga)

I’ve been using the beta and release candidate versions of Office 2010 in my day-to-day work for the past couple of months – PowerPoint for my public speaking stuff, Outlook for email, scheduling and get-things-done stuff and OneNote for my copious note-taking. We’d like you to take it for a spin!

Join us at one of our Microsoft Office 2010 Installfests and we’ll hook you up with the latest build of Office, show you some of our favourite features and demonstrate how to get the most out of our productivity suite.

For more details about the Office 2010 Installfests or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Office 2010 Installfest page.

Academic Sessions

We’ll also be passing through a number of colleges across Canada, talking to students about getting ready for the working world and showing them resources that they can use to fire up their careers.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Are you Canadian and going to the MIX10 Conference?

If you’re going to MIX10, let me know, either in the comments or via email. A number of us from Microsoft Canada will be there and we’d love to catch up with you!

Among the Canadian contingent going to Vegas are:

• Gladstone Grant, Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead
• Allan Hoffman, ISV Group Manager
• Paul Laberge, Web Platform Evangelist
• John Oxley, Director, Audience Marketing and my manager
• Mark Relph, Senior Director, Windows Ecosystem (and former Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead)
• Jamie Wakeam, ISV Architect Evangelist
• Yours Truly, Joey deVilla, Developer Evangelist and guy with accordion

Hope to see you there!

What is MIX10?

MIX10 is the 2010 edition of MIX, Microsoft’s most “right-brained” conference. Its area of focus is on the web and other technologies that aren’t the desktop, which is traditionally where Microsoft “lives”, as well as on design, usability, information architecture and user experience. Silverlight made its first appearance here, under the less-wieldy name of WPF/E (“WPF Everywhere”), as have improved versions of Internet Explorer. Expect some interesting stuff at MIX this year!

Here’s a list of the topics that will be covered at MIX10:

The Full Monty on Windows Phone Development

Glaringly absent from yesterday’s Windows Phone 7 Series announcement made at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona was the “how”: that is, how do you develop apps for Windows Phone 7?

That question will be answered at MIX10 (March 15th – 17th in Las Vegas) in a number of ways.

If you go to MIX10, you will get the following:

• Access to a track dedicated to Windows Phone 7 Series platform
• An introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series’ development platform
• Tutorials on how to work with the Windows Phone 7 Series’ development tools
• A tour of the Windows Phone Marketplace
• And last – but certainly not least — access to the Windows Phone 7 Series developer tools!

The Hallway Opportunity

I’ve always believed that one of the marks of a good conference is the hallway. By “hallway”, I’m talking about the opportunities to meet people in those times and places between and after sessions. There’s something to meeting people in person that you don’t get online; hence the often-used saying “you had to be there”. MIX promises to have good hallway, partly because of the Microsoft teams who’ll be presenting some interesting new stuff and partly because the crowd is going to be a mixed bag of developer types, designer types and the type of people who like to straddle both worlds (I like to think of myself in that category).

Go!

MIX10 takes place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th. If you register before February 21st, you’ll get a $200 discount off the MIX10 admission fee. Do it now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the third in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010, the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from Beautiful Failure, a keynote given by my friend Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite, who’s forgotten more about combinators than I will ever learn.

My notes from his keynote appear below; Reg has also published his slides online.

• I gave a talk at Stack Overflow DevDays Toronto in which I was thinking out loud about programming about programming
• I was trying to rewrite the way we program
• The language we use for coding guides the way we think about the program and the solutions
• When you write things to change your programming language, you change the way you think

Thinking About Programming About Programming

• I often get called in by clients to automate a process
• Often, during this process, they want to change the process that I’m supposed to automate
• Automating a process forces you to think about it
• The very act of thinking about how you do things helps you understand what it is you do
• The exercise of thinking it through is useful, even if it fails or you don’t end up using it
• Languages and frameworks come and go, but everything you to do fix what’s between your ears stays with you forever
• Programming languages are just a notation for the way we think

• Some people try to do things like add a "sum" method to Ruby’s Enumerable mixin
• What happen when you try [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]].sum?
• [He showed two implementations of a “sum” method:
  • One by “Alice”, which when applied to [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]], yielded 21,
  • and one by “Bob”, which when applied to [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]], yielded [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
• With “monkeypatching”, it’s possible for two different modules to implement Enumerable#sum, and then for someone else to import both modules.
  • In which case, which version of sum will get called? It depends on the load order of the module
  • But what if these were written as gems? Then there’s trouble
• To solve this sort of problem, I decided to steal extension methods from C# and add them to Ruby [Joey’s note: extension methods are a C# feature that let you add methods to an existing class without subclassing]
• It works, but what’s wrong with what I’ve done?
• My extension methods for Ruby are a hack…
  • to fix Alice and Bob’s hack…
  • of Matz’s (Yukihiro Matsumoto) hack of Smalltalk’s hack (i.e., Ruby)
• It eliminates the annoyance without solving the core problem
• Do extension methods reengineer the way we think about problems? Or do they simply deal with an annoyance?
• Do they reengineer the way we think about programs?

• Take the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)
• When you write an extension method, you break SRP
• When you monkeypatch, you violate SRP
• Is that bad? I don’t know
  • C# breaks SRP with extension methods
  • Rails "runs roughshod over it"
  • If two popular languages break SRP, maybe SRP isn’t all that
  • What does the sum method tell us?
  • Why is this a beautiful failure?
  • Maybe we’ve gone beyond the class — Ruby is not C++ or Smalltalk
  • Hacks like this scratch an itch and suggest a flaw — what else is flawed?
• You have an advantage over me
  • I have this ball and chain of experience
  • I’ve been fucking with computers for almost 40 years
  • They way I’ve been doing things has made me a living; I’m not incented to change the way I do things
  • You’re not tied down
• So now I present a few ideas that have occurred to me — think about them!
  • I don’t have the answers

• Unit tests tell us that compilers are flawed
  • If we need them, what is wrong with our programming languages and compilers that requires us to step out of what we’re doing to implement them?
  • Why do we need to take a great language and bolt something onto the side?
• Github tells us that our existing idea of a program is flawed
  • Most people think of programs as static things
  • In Github, there is no "program" — there are branches, forks and tags
  • Languages themselves have no notion of what a version is
  • Looking at the way we actually use tools shows that there’s a disconnect between our toolsets and the way we write code
  • Are Github commits congruent to objects?
    • If you change 4 classes in a commit, there must be something they have in common, but that’s not apparent from the way we write them
• Do we manage work the way we manage code?
  • Project management seems awfully disconnected from our tool chain
  • Consider the complete disconnect between issue tracking and time tracking
  • Maybe not so important in your company, but more important for personal projects
  • Git and Lighthouse — “like two cups connected by string”
• Do we manage object versions the way we manage API versions?

• "Do not follow in the footsteps of the sages, seek what they sought."
• What I think is particularly cool and interesting is…but to me
• Think about what your heroes were trying to achieve using the tools available to you today
• An example of following blindly in the footsteps of sages:
  • In November 2002, I attended Paul Graham’s “Lightweight Languages 2” conference in Boston
  • The morning keynote was by John Armstrong, who presented Erlang, which today is considered an important language for concurrent programming
  • The afternoon keynotes was Matz, who presented Ruby, one of the most influential dynamic languages that soon after enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity
  • Many people in the room, die-hard Lisp-heads, were shouting them down because their languages didn’t have macros [Joey’s note: Macros are a Lisp feature that smug Lisp weenies often use in the never-ending “Why my language is better than your language” argument]

Four Ugly Failure Modes and How to Avoid Them

Confusing correlation with causation

• I think it’s one of the most prevalent diseases in the business world
• Ruby is not a silver bullet
  • Was the success of many Ruby projects [such as Rails and Twitter] because of Ruby the language?
  • Or was it that smart people who could get things done were picking Ruby at a given point in time?
• Agile is not a process
  • It’s a set of values
• Here’s how many companies fail:
  • They start a little consulting company
  • They enjoy some successes, which leads to more business
  • As a result, they hire people and the company grows
  • But they can’t hire smart people faster than the work is coming in
  • So in order to hire people to meet the demand, they start hiring people who aren’t as smart
  • That’s when things go downhill
  • Who here doesn’t think this isn’t standard for any consulting company?
• Toronto Agile User Group recruiting process
  • In our field, "best practices" are cow patties
  • I’ve gone to many companies where they combine "best practices" simply by smooshing them together
  • I’ve been to many Toronto Agile User Group meetings where very few attendees work at companies that even practice agile
  • The important thing is that the people there are attending because interested in finding a better way of doing their work – those are the people you should be hiring!
• The plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
  • Greg Wilson will talk about this in his keynote later today – listen to him!
  • Problem: Talks are given by narcissists (or masochists)
  • When you read something in a blog, see something on TV or buy a book, you’re not getting a large enough sample, and the content is biased
  • Another problem is that history is written by the survivors
  • People write about really notable successes or failures

Confirmation bias

• "Most of you will be immune to this, because you’re all sensible people"
• You might fall victim to confirmation bias if you have an overly-inflated (or under-inflated) ego
• You might also fall victim to it if your worldview is too narrow
  • If you’re a Ruby developer, you probably don’t read C# blogs, and vice versa
• Seek out more representative info; not just the stuff that confirms your opinions

Local maxima

• The innovator’s dilemma
  • If you have customers, they will trap you in a local maximum
  • They’re not trying to be mean, they’re trying to give you money
  • You might end up optimizing to serve your customer base while the rest of the world (and eventually your business moves on)
• The Principle of Least Surprise is a trap!
  • Familiarity comes from doing the old things the old way
  • This doesn’t apply to just UI, but also naming variables or coding styles
  • Once in a while, you should say "Maybe this one time, we should do things differently"
• Iterative anything is a trap
  • It’s hill climbing
  • Sometimes you have to leap
  • It’s supposed to be bad to "go dark" in development for a longer period rather than go through many small iterations, but sometimes it’s the only way to make a great leap
  • You can’t climb a big mountain if you do things in small increments

"A Market for Lemons"

• What happens when you sell to people who don’t fundamentally understand what they’re buying?
• If customers don’t understand what they’re buying, they make their decisions based on easily differentiable features
• One example is buying a house, which you’re not going to do very often in your life, so most people know very little about it
  • As a result, they focus on easily differentiable features like square footage, number of rooms, and other features that can easily be picked out
  • But it’s better to focus on whether the house’s design makes it more liveable, which is harder to suss out
• Another example of this is feature checklists on the back of product boxes
• Gresham’s Law — “bad money drives out good” — applies to talent: When you have good currency and bad currency in an economy, the bad currency drives the good currency out
  • This happens in Cuba, where the good currency – black market US dollars – gets hoarded while the local currency gets spent
  • It also applies to information: people put the crappy information out, and it drives the good information down
  • It also applies to talent: headhunters, not knowing what sort of people to look for, end up grabbing the people who put the most buzzwords on their resumes
• You don’t want to be one of those buyers

At the end of the presentation, posted a slide dedicated to his late friend, Sam Roweis (1972 – 2010).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the second in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010, the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from NSFW, a keynote given by my friend Pete Forde, partner at Unspace and one of the bright lights of Toronto’s tech scene.

My notes appear below. Pete’s posted his slides, notes and URLs online; be sure to check them out.

Introduction

“This talk is going to be adult,” began Pete. “If you can’t handle it, you should probably leave. I’ll buy you a Dasani afterwards.”

• I’m a partner at Unspace
  • It’s a company where I decided to bet the farm on Rails, a platform I like
  • We’ve done unusual things, like hold a job fair where local Ruby programmers could show off their work
  • We’ve built software projects for the UN
  • Every project we take on has a lot of heart
  • We don’t want to work with anyone who isn’t super-excited to be there
• I’m a software developer, have been for a long time
• But deep down, I want to be a designer
  • I have no formal training — I can’t draw; I can’t paint
  • I see life as a series of carefully-executed series of five year plans
  • I dropped out of high school 20 minutes before the final exam; I told the principal that I didn’t want him to take credit for future success
    • I don’t recommend this; it’s probably not repeatable, not even by me
• You – as engineering and computer science students –- are better educated than me
  • “You probably know math and stuff”
• In the past, I was a punk, and many other things
  • I’ve been a musician
  • I’ve also been a zine publisher
  • I’ve tried on a lot of things to see if the shoe fits
  • I’ve had an interesting run
• When I get to the end of 5 years of doing something, I review what I’ve done
  • I’ve had 5 years of doing software at Unspace – what now?

On Pete

• My dad’s an engineer, and as such, is a perfectionist
  • Engineers are by and large pedantic control freaks — and that’s okay, we need you to be that way!
• I’ve discovered that I’m a starter, not a finisher
• This tendency has put me at odds with my family and I used to feel really guilty about it
• Now I realize is that you need to play to your strengths — recognize that you have an instinct, and harness it!
• Is what you’re doing against the grain?
  • "There’s no time like the present to get your life on track"
  • "I could have saved myself a lot of time if I could talk to my present-day self"
• As a starter but not a finisher, I realized that I had to recruit doers, people who could take my ideas and run with them
  • Some of these projects will succeed
  • Some will fail…but they’ll fail grandly
  • I’ve got lots of things on the go
  • Am I arrogant? I see it as audacious
  • Seth Godin said: “If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader."
• I am an introvert
  • See the article in The Atlantic, Caring for Your Introvert
  • So what am I doing onstage?
  • People who appear practiced onstage look that way because they are practiced

On Success

• Steve Jobs says: “Find what you love”
  • People confuse “successful” with “happy”
  • Are you putting your life on hold to go and make your paycheque?
  • I’m convinced that many financially successful people are unhappy and bitte
• Malcom Gladwell’s The Sure Thing
  • It paints a different picture from the one we see in the media of the entrepreneur as daring, as a “cowboy”
  • Entrepreneurs who became empire builders turned out be highly risk-averse
  • Their success comes from seeing opportunities in arbitrage and taking advantage of them
  • Consider John Paulson:
    • His hedge fund made money shorting America’s economy
    • He bought shorts on subprime mortgages
  • These men are predatory entrepreneurs in my opinion
  • Do they really need billions?
  • Maybe they don’t do it for evil – perhaps it might be for the thrill
• Don’t want to model himself after these people
  • There’s a line written by Seth Tobocman, who wrote the comic book World War 3: "You don’t have to fuck people over to survive."
  • My twist on that is "You don’t have to fuck yourself over to be successful."
• Who would I rather model myself after? Steve Jobs
  • He said: “Good business makes for good art”
• Another good bit of advice comes from Andy Warhol: “Think rich, look poor.”
• On Being an Artist
  • There used to be a harsh disciplinary division between technology and art and it’s reflected in code and art
  • Different now in the era of Rails
  • I like holding parties and inviting all sorts of people: if you put interesting people together from all walks of life, you’ve got a catalyst for change in your living room
  • The lines are blurring: we’re all artists now
• Consider these guys
  • Ronald Tackmann, escape artist
    • "He hates being free"
  • Blane Nordahl, Silver thief
    • "The Mr. Belvedere of silver theft"
  • Both really good, treated their work like artistry

On Starting Up

• How Unspace came to be
  • It started 5 years ago with 2 friends in 170 square feet of space
  • “There wasn’t enough room to lie down and make a snow angel”
  • Everything that happened in those first years was "path of least resistance"
  • We had this weird notion that Unspace would be worth nothing and function as a quasi-legal organization whose reason for being was so that we could write off tech toy purchases
• We got lucky: Two founding partners — moved on to other things
  • One of them has since moved on, regrettably, to Ashley Madison
  • Choosing partners was important decision
• Optimism springs eternal among entrepreneurs: there’s always that feeling that nothing can go wrong
• Daniel Tenier says: “Partnerships suck”
  • It’s important to make your agreements explicit
  • Don’t be afraid to discuss bad stuff
  • Write everything down
  • You can’t make it work at all costs – you need to know when to walk away
  • Try to get to the bottom of questions like "What’s your definition of success?" Of failure? What’s the sunset clause? What’s the shotgun clause?
  • If you absolutely don’t need a partner, go it yourself (I myself, since I’m not a finisher, need a partner)
  • Look up what Chris Dixon has written about founder vesting

On Products

• Most consulting companies start as product companies that were broke
• Consulting is “kind of like a drug” — it keeps the fix coming

On Customer Development

• You need to read Steven Gary Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• The ideas in this book led to the feeling in venture circles that customer development is a good thing
• If you’re starting a company that sells things to people, read it!

Leadership

• Seth Godin says this of leadership: It’s about painting a picture of the future for other people and then leading them to it
• Back in 2004, things went terribly wrong
• I partnered with my friend Ryan, and it lasted a month
• I had “lots of partners” – it was hard to get things done
• Having a captain is good
• In addition to being a “time-and-materials” company, we also started holding events
  • We instituted Rails Pub Nite, a monthly event that created a sense on community and gets regular attendance
    • Opposite of a user group: no agenda
    • It’s the "smartest thing we’ve ever done as a company"
    • At the time, “people making a living off Ruby you could count on both hands”
    • One of the raisons d’etre of Rails Pub Nite was to create meaningful competition
    • We went so much farther ahead by giving it the generic name Rails Pub Nite as opposed to Unspace Pub Nite
    • What we wanted to do was not create a feeling of participating in a corporate social experience
    • It was successful: Rails Pub Nite’s mailing list has 450 people, and every Pub Nite gets 40 – 50 attendees, and not just Ruby programmers, but also Java, .NET and PHP

Building Your Team

• Another benefit of Rails Pub Nite is that it lets us meet all the smart people first
• We have a “non-traditional fit test”
• I feel that 8 – 14 people is perfect size for company
• I’m tired of working for small companies that grew to large companies that started to suck
• I’d rather have 3 companies with 12 people than 1 with 40 people

On Guilt

• I have no high school education — how am I building projects for the UN?
• It’s why sometimes, I feel like a fraud
• Many people have this feeling; it’s called “Impostor Syndrome”
• I feel like living embodiment of "fake it until you make it"
• Refactoring makes me feel like a fraud
• It’s the "Embarrassing Pattern": after looking over my code, it seems that I could replace a lot of it with existing stuff and patterns
• “Your entire codebase can be abstracted away”
• "I just spent a month writing 40 lines of code"
• You have to recognize that it happens

On Getting Ahead

• Read Derek Sivers’ (he’s the guy who created CDBaby and later sold it) article, There’s No Speed Limit
• He says that “the standard pace is for chumps”
• To get ahead, you have to push yourself beyond what you think your limits are
• We can do whatever we want, as fast as we want

Adventure

• Learning Giles Bowkett’s story through his RubyFringe presentation completely changed my life
  • [Joey’s note: really, you should watch the video of this presentation, even if you never ever plan to write a single line of Ruby in your life. It’s inspiring.]
• It was all about leading a life less ordinary
• In our line of work, we create things that didn’t exist before
• When someone who doesn’t know how to create things is put in charge of people who do, it’s bad
  • I believe that Giles called them "Weasel-brained muppetfuckers"
• Giles quotes Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship”
• My advice on dating websites: "Don’t make them"

On Marketing

• I’ve mentioned Seth Godin many times already
• Sometimes his books have 3 pages of insight buried in 100 pages – I supposed it’s a case of “The Devil’s in the details”
• Read The Dip, skip Tribes
• In Tribes, Godin says that people don’t believe what you tell them, sometimes believe what their friends tell them and always believe the stories they tell themselves.
• So give people stories they can tell themselves

On Ideas

• Dr. Edwin Land: Invented instant photography – Polaroid
• Polaroid was thought of as dead until enthusiasts like Florian Kaps bought the Polaroid factory and now they’re bringing Polaroid film back to the market
• I wanted to bring him to FutureRuby, but he was too busy changing the world
• Another person to watch: Kacie Kinzer, the creator of Tweenbots
• Also watch: Neil Gershenfeld
  • He builds fablabs
  • He’s building them in places so low-tech that they don’t even have electricity
  • Get involved with the MIT "Bits and Atoms" program
• Another person to read about: William Kamkwamba (see The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind)
  • [Joey’s note: Watch his presentation at TED!]

Grand Visions for the Future

• Disney wanted EPCOT to be a utopian city, a city of the future, but bureaucracy got in the way
• Jacque Fresco: 93-year-old chronic inventor — a radical revolutionary
  • He designs amazing future habitat buildings
  • He has a whole compound of bubble domes in Venus, Florida
  • See the movie Future by Design
  • He’s 93 — "You know what that implies"

On Being Happy

• Listen up!
• Once again, a Steve Jobs quote: "Your time is limited. "
• Look at Jessica Hische, who’s obsessed with type and makes beautiful things
  • She followed her passion, and now she’s an internationally sought-after type artist
  • She recently said: “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This is the first of a series of notes that I took while attending CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, which took place last week in Montreal. CUSEC is the biggest conference held by and for university students interested in software development. True to the Canadian techies punching well above their weight class (a great tradition started by Alexander Graham Bell), CUSEC manages to pull in big-name and up-and-coming speakers who’ve given talks that have outshined those I’ve seen an thousand-dollar-plus conferences.

The first keynote was given by Matt Knox, who has probably distributed more Scheme runtimes than anyone else in the world (and this is a larger number than you might think), which he did in the name of putting adware on millions of machines. He’s since come to his senses and seems quite contrite.

His presentation, On Weakness, is about his life on the Dark Side and the lessons he gleaned from it. It’s based on his talk, Crimes Against Humanity, Writ Small, which he gave at FutureRuby last year, but it was good to see it again, and its message is probably even more valuable to students. My notes (which I polished for comprehensibility) and photos from his session appear below:

An Evil Job

• How many of you are:
  • Technical, as opposed to business or arts students?
  • Engineering students?
  • Programmers?
  • Evil?
• That’s what this talk is about
• One way to describe one of my former jobs is doing “Windows hijinks with Scheme”
• During my time with that job, I released many scheme runtimes
• Aaron Swartz – I think it was at a Y Combinator startup camp – said this of me: "He uses Scheme for evil!"
• It was more than just Scheme – I was writing stuff that had alternately “hard” (statically-typed languages) and “soft” (dynamically-typed languages) layers
• I was in the adware business, which is like walking into a big monkey knife fight…
• …except I was using a death ray! (Scheme == death ray, C == knife)
• I started with good intentions, in the business of building spam filters
• Business wasn’t so hit, and I ran out of money
• My job search failed, but luckily, a job went looking for me
• I was so pleased with being found that I  forgot to talk salary
• I showed up for the interview and at the end, was invited to work for them
• I did terribly when it came time to discuss what I would be paid
  • I didn’t research the New York City job market and cost of living
  • I asked for $40K
  • When I saw the look of shock of the guy’s face, I thought that I had asked for too much
  • Start reducing what I asked for; luckily he stopped me
• We want you to come in an analyze our distribution chain, they said
• It turned out to be an adware company:
  • Bought people’s “digital tchochkes” or mini-apps, such as screensavers
  • They had realized that there’s no lower bound for how cheesy something can be and still be a big seller on the internet
  • They took these mini-apps and gave them away online for free, bundled with software that gives you "special offers" from time to time
• Some of these bundled apps turned out to be worms
  • So the company had me write software to remove any worms from a system and added them to the bundle
  • So now we were bundling my anti-malware along with their adware
  • I felt like "an assassin working for the mob, but killing terrorists". The mob were bad, but the terrorists were worse
  • "Awesome! I can probably keep up with Norton…it’ll be great!"
  • And for a while, the best way to eradicate worms your system was to install their adware with my anti-malware bundled with it
• Low-level coding is dangerously seductive
  • In the beginning, it’s "like getting kicked in the face over and over again by buffer overruns"
  • But then it becomes fascinating
• I wanted to do it in Scheme, but that would require embedding a Scheme interpreter
  • Such an interpreter would have to fit into a single TCP/IP packet (about 64K)
  • Scheme is great. For any superlative — “best performance”, “smallest app”, and so on – there are usually two contenders: some other language, and Scheme.
  • I managed to squeeze a Scheme interpreter down to 19K
• My success with killing the worms led to a new request: In addition to your all this malware on other machines, why not eliminate all the competitor’s adware?
  • Now I felt like “an assassin for the mob, killing other mobsters”. Not as noble.
• Then the next request came: How about keeping our software from being killed…by anything? (including Norton)
  • The only way to uninstall the adware was to use the uninstaller, which came with it
  • I initially viewed this as "a really interesting technical problem"
• All this was made possible by a couple of Windows quirks…
  • CreateRemoteThread
    • This basically says to a process: "Hey, process! Execute this code as part of yourself, and you’ll think it’s awesome."
    • This lets you have code executing even though a process isn’t running
    • You don’t even need threads – you can hook interrupts
  • Scheduler
    • You can have a process tell the scheduler that it needs to do a do-over — "I’m not done yet, I need more time", and the scheduler will grant that time
    • You can tell even Windows that a process is so important that if it fails, it needs to protect the user by presenting a blue screen
• Windows is interesting from a purely archaeological perspective
  • Consider that all strings in Windows are 16-bit unicode, which means that nulls can be embedded in strings
  • But C strings, which is what’s used in the underlying DOS, are null-terminated and therefore can’t contain nulls
  • Interesting effects when moving null-containing strings between these layers

What Drives People to Take Up Evil Jobs?

• Aftermath of my working at the adware company:
  • Company got sued for $190 billion (by Elliot Spitzer!)
  • I was the first employee at the company — everyone else was a contractor
• I left the company with these questions:
  • "Whut happen?"
  • "Is this who I am?"
• Some jobs pay lots of money, but it’s hard to transition out of them
• Will I be stuck in adware for the rest of my life?
• There are some historical precedents:
  • Albert Speer
    • A promising architect who liked soaring buildings
    • He hooked up with rising politicians with the same aesthetic sense, one of whom was Hitler
    • He started with creating buildings, but then became the Nazis’ chief logistics guy
    • Later, a leader of the U.S. Air Force said that had he been aware of Speer’s involvement as the Nazi’s chief logistics guy, he would’ve dedicated an entire wing of the Air Force exclusively to killing him
    • It’s been suggested that Speer prolonged the war by a year or two by running the German forces more efficiently
  • Manhattan Project staff
• But I didn’t want anecdotes…I wanted science!
  • There’s a scientific study of otherwise good people doing evil things: the Milgram Experiment
    • How many people would go all the way?
    • 1% of the population is psychotic – it was hypothesized that the number of people who’d go all the way would be similar
    • Instead, 70% did
    • Results replicatable with people from all walks of life
    • Women, it turned out, “went evil” in a slightly greater proportion than the men
    • "Most human evil lives here"
• Read The Black Book of Communism
• For a more mundane example of blind obedience to authority leading to evil, see "The strip search McDonald’s prank call"
  • In the prank, the prankster calls a McDonald’s, gets an employee on the line and says “I’m a police officer. We have reason to believe that there is a thief in your restaurant and we need you to take them into the back and hold them until we arrive.”
  • They provide a description vague enough so that someone in the restaurant will match it
  • Once coralled in the back, the prankster starts giving orders to torture and/or humiliate the customer, and many employees have complied
• So what does this mean?
  • The human brain has a remote root exploit in 70% of the installed base
• "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." — Steven Weinberg
  • Nope. Just authority.
• There is hope: people who were subjects of the Milgram experiments turned out to be better at resisting authoritative coercion

The Power of Communication

• Math: "There are only three reasonable numbers: 0, 1 and infinity"
• When Robert Andrews Millikan did his oil drop experiments to determine the charge on an electron, he initially got the value wrong by 30 – 40%
  • People who repeated the experiment or conducted similar experiments with results close to Millikan’s erroneous number published their results
  • People who did so but got the correct value – which did not match Millikan’s value – didn;t publish, worried that they’d done something wrong, since their numbers didn’t agree with the number published by the authority on the subject
• The world pre-blogs was so different from this world
  • Very first open source project: Oxford English Dictionary
    • Done via mail
  • Ever wondered where the term "flying off the handle" comes from?
    • It’s from sword-making – until they figured out the process of making swords as one-piece, with hand-friendly stuff wrapped around the base so you could hold them, swords often flew off their handles in battle
    • It took 900 years to evolve swords to one piece
• Not everything has been solved, but it’s easier today
• Rails is such a solution
  • It’s a series of incremental improvements
  • Can you out-Rails Rails?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Photo by Tom Purves.

I’m boarding a Porter flight bound for Montreal, where I’ll be attending CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference). I’ll be there from today through Saturday afternoon, watching technical presentation, flying the Microsoft banner, hosting DemoCamp and having a beer (or twelve) with my fellow conference-goers. I’ll be posting notes and photos from the presentations and other goings-on, so watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For the latter half of this week, I’ll be at CUSEC – the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference – the annual Montreal-based conference by and for Canadian university students interested in topics on software development and engineering. For a conference that’s aimed at students, it punches above its weight class, having hosted some big name speakers including:

• Richard M. Stallman (last year, in a presentation where I won the auction for a Free Software Foundation plush gnu and offered to pay for it with my Microsoft corporate credit card)
• David Parnas
• Kathy Sierra
• Ralph Johnson
• Kent Beck
• Alistair Cockburn
• Dave Thomas
• Tim Bray
• Zed Shaw
• Jeff Atwood

This year’s speaker list is pretty good. Among them are:

• Douglas Crockford, Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!.  If you truly want to understand JavaScript, listen to this guy! When people were dismissing JavaScript as a toy language – a strange concept in these Ajax-powered days, but this really was the case – he wrote articles like JavaScript: The Wrrrld’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language and other must-read pieces, all of which live at javascript.crockford.com. He’s also the author of the book JavaScript: The Good Parts, which is required reading for web developers. I had the pleasure of meeting him and seeing him speak at the Ajax Experience conference in Boston in 2006, and he’s both a great presenter and guy to hang out with at apres-conference events.
• Greg Wilson, Assistant Professor at U of T. Greg is many things: much-sought-after provider to academic advice and support at U of T, co-editor of Beautiful Code, DemoCamp Toronto steward, and now, the guy behind the best presentation at the Stack Overflow DevDays Toronto: Bits of Evidence: What We Actually Know About Software and Why We Believe It’s True. It was the presentation so nice, he’s doing it twice – this time at CUSEC. Don’t miss this one!
• Reg Braithwaite, Superprogrammer-at-large. Whether you know him as “Reg” or “raganwald”, you know that he’s got some seriously big-ass ideas about programming. Very few people push Ruby metaprogramming to its limits the way he does. Every time I see one of his presentations, I come out a little bit smarter.
• Pete Forde, Unspace. Pete’s one of the “corporate speakers”, a designation that probably makes him feel very uncomfortable. He’s one of the guys behind the Toronto-based development shop Unspace and behind two of the best conferences I’ve ever attended, RubyFringe (2008) and FutureRuby (2009). It’s anyone’s guess as to what he’ll talk about, but it should be good, and we can only hope that he begins it with a dance number, like he did with his presentation at the Mesh 2009 conference.
• Leigh Honeywell, Symantec. Leigh has forgotten more about security than I will ever learn, and she’s also one of the founders of HacklabTO, the Toronto “hackerspace”.

I had the opportunity to speak at last year’s CUSEC and had a wonderful time both speaking and hanging out with the students. I love the conference vibe – the energy, brainpower and passion of the attendees is palpable, and it makes me optimistic for the future of tech in Canada. I’m only too glad to be able to attend this year, and I’m honoured to be invited to host their DemoCamp event, which will take place Thursday evening.

I’ll be filing reports from CUSEC, so watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Ottawa-based developer Colin Melia has been a big help to me with TechDays. He presented at TechDays Ottawa, helped organize Demo Night in Canada, and posted a simple Windows Azure deployment exercise that I’ve found quite helpful and useful.

I’d like to return the favour by promoting the three sessions – that’s right, three – that he submitted to MIX10 in their open call for content. They are:

1. Everything You Touch Turns to Azure
   Feel the rush of power as you learn how to wave your hands and connect directly to your throne in the heavens – OK well you may have to settle for learning about Windows Touch in WPF/Silverlight and the Windows Azure Platform.  This is the future – make sure that everything you touch can turn to Azure.

   The session shows how the building blocks of Windows Touch, WPF/Silverlight applications and the Windows Azure Platform can be brought together to create a small yet engaging end-to-end experience.  Attendees should gain insight into the benefits and design of Touch-aware applications on Windows 7 as well as the benefits of backing user experiences with the Windows Azure Platform.

2. Get a WIF of This
   Writing services that understand multiple authentication systems is cumbersome and completely yesterday. Claims-based authentication and authorisation is the way to go. We’ll take a dive into how claims work and what Windows Identity Foundation provides by exploring the key components, but more importantly by building our own identify provider, a claims-based service and a Silverlight application that makes use of it.

   WIF recently RTM’d but the identify framework it cements is one of the most overlooked components when it comes to Internet-based application design.  Attendees should leave with a sense of how to create WIF components or WIF-aware components, as well as knowledge of the necessary design considerations.

3. The Cloud and the Silver Lining
   You need a place to host your Silverlight applications as well as the WCF RIA Services and database that back them.  This session shows you not only that the Windows Azure Platform (featuring Windows Azure, SQL Azure and other services), is a great place to put them, but also how to create the connections between the pieces.

   This session digs into the mechanics of a real-world application using Silverlight and the Windows Azure Platform.  Attendees should leave knowing how to easily test against and deploy to the Azure Platform, as well as how communication takes place between the component layers. 

I’d like to see Colin speak at MIX10. He’s a good speaker, he’s chosen some interesting and relevant topics, and he’d be a Canadian presence at MIX. If you agree with me, please vote for his sessions on the MIX10 Open Call for Entries site by Friday, January 15th! (If you want to see a list of all the proposed sessions, they’re here.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, which takes place from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where I’ll be catching sessions and posting photos and reports. If you can spare a couple of days off work to attend Mix10, you should too – and soon, because the early bird discount is going to evaporate very soon!

What is MIX?

The email sigs for people involved with MIX claim that it’s a “designer/developer lovefest for the web”, and I think it’s a pretty one-line summary of the event. It’s a conference for people who develop and design for the web, with particular attention paid to user interface and experience. This will be the 5th MIX conference, the first one having been held in 2006.

What Sort of Sessions Will There Be at MIX10?

Here’s a selection of some of the sessions and workshops at MIX10:

• Boot camps on up-and coming frameworks, such as Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2
• Molly Holzschlag’s all-day HTML5 workshop
• Sessions on user experience such as:
  • Design Fundamentals for Developers
  • The Art, Technology and Science of Reading
  • The Laws of User Experience
  • Running with Wireframes: Taking Information Architecture into Design
• Technology sessions such as
  • Building Cloud Services with Windows Azure Platform
  • Miguel de Icaza’s session on The Mono Project
  • Robots at MySpace: Massive Scaling a .NET Website with the Microsoft Robotics Studio
  • Touch in Public: Multi-Touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences

There are some other cool things happening at MIX10 that I can’t talk about until the conference. Be there, or if you can’t, watch this space!

You Get to Vote!

You can help choose some of the content for MIX10! We took a number of submissions for presentations in an open call for content, and now it’s time to vote for them. You can see all the submissions here, and voting ends on Friday, January 15th.

Early-Bird Discount

If you register for MIX10 by January 15th, you’ll save US$600 off the admission and pay only US$795 – and you’ll also get a free night at the conference hotel, Mandalay Bay! After the 15th, the price goes up to a full US$1395, so if you want to go, register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Last week, I was in Montreal, this week I’m in Ottawa. Once again, I’ll be road-tripping with my coworker, Damir Bersinic, IT Pro Evangelist and supreme field commander for the TechDays Canada cross-country conference. Watch this space for reports from both Ottawa and the road!

If you’re on the Toronto-Ottawa route and would like to join us for a coffee, let us know, either via email or in the comments!

Day 2 of Techdays Montreal began with the A/V techs (and yes, me) ooh-ing and ahh-ing at presenter Maxime Rouiller’s Alienware laptop, He showed us the utility for controlling its backlighting colours:

Once set up, the Building for the Microsoft-Based Platorm track’s acting host Laurent Duveau introduced Maxime, who then presented Introducing ASP.NET MVC.

Maxime will present the same session in Ottawa, so if you’re there, you too can get a look at that Alienware. Wonder what it would take to get Microsoft to assign me one of those babies.

Continuing the morning’s ASP.NET MVC theme, Simon Laroche took to the lectern:

Simon presented SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which used the refactoring of an ASP.NET MVC application to demonstrate the SOLID principles of object-oriented design in action:

Next came lunch, once again held on Centre Mont-Royal’s fourth floor:

Here are Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus preparing for the lunchtime presentation:

And here they are doing that presentation, in which they show off some of the new features in Office 2010. I rather the like the goodies in PowerPoint 2010:

In the meantime, some of the attendees hung out in the Windows 7 lounge, trying out the touchscreen machines and playing games – including the indie hit I MAED A GAME WITH Z0MB1ES!!!1 – on the XBox 360:

Mario Cardinal led the first session of the afternoon:

His presentation was on Building RESTful Applications Using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Mario knows his stuff, and as a seasoned presenter, had no problem crossing the stage and doing part of his delivery far away from the lectern and any speaker’s notes:

Mario will also present the same session at TechDays Ottawa.

Some of the staff saw me walking around with Rick’s DSLR camera and asked me to take their picture. I was happy to do so – TechDays doesn’t happen without their help:

One nice thing about Centre Mont-Royal is that there’s plenty of “hanging out” space. If you’re not spending at least a little time in these spaces between sessions, getting to know the other techies in your community, you’re not getting all you can out of TechDays:

The final session in my track had Francis Beaudet speaking:

He presented Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint:

Day 2 wrapped up at 4:00 p.m., at which point we quickly dismantled the machines we’d set up on Tuesday and packed them up for shipping to Techdays Ottawa. Some of the team stayed to do the end-of-conference review, which Christian and I had to run to catch the Microsoft open source cocktail party at the W, which I’ll cover in the next blog entry.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number of volunteers (in fact, there were too many; the conference typically “overbooks volunteers in anticipation of a drop-off, but every volunteer who signed up showed up!).

It was a fun conference, and I was honoured to be selected as a speaker for the event. It was good meeting Joel again (it’s been a number of years now) and speaking on the same stage with some good local friends (Reg Braithwaite and Greg Wilson) as well as some new ones (Jordan Baker and Ralph Whitbeck).

At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

For the benefit of all, I’ve posted the slides from all the presentations below:

ASP.NET MVC: Barry Gervin and Joey deVilla

Our presentation followed Joel’s opening keynote and was centred around a live-coding demo in which we built a quick-and-dirty ASP.NET MVC-based clone of RunPee.com, a site that lets you know at what times you can take a bathroom break from a movie in a theatre and not miss any crucial plot points.

I’ll admit it right now: this presentation could’ve been much better, and as the one who gets paid to promote Microsoft’s tools and technologies, I assume full responsibility for this one (Barry’s a great presenter who volunteered and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to do this). Watch this space for a "lessons learned" post, as well as some ASP.NET MVC posts that take the material from the presentation and explain it a little better.

Python: Jordan Baker

Jordan’s presentation was an introduction to Python by way of a walk-through of Peter Norvig’s How to Write a Spelling Corrector exercise, which comprises 21 lines of Python 2.5 but in those few lines, covers a lot of the Python programming language.

jQuery: Ralph Whitbeck

Ralph’s presentation was a walk-through of jQuery’s features, and how it will make your web applications sing. I need to get more familiar with jQuery (I’m far more acquainted with Prototype and Scriptaculous), so Ralph’s was the technology demo that was the most useful to me.

Academic: Greg Wilson

By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of "let’s change the world" vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions. This presentation got a lot of applause, and deservedly so — there’s nothing like a great topic delivered by a great presenter.

Ruby: Reg Braithwaite

Reg Braithwaite’s talk — made up of slides consisting entirely of Ruby code (or Ruby pseudocode, where appropriate) — wasn’t so much about Ruby as it was about metaprogramming, with Ruby examples. Following the quip about a man (one account says it was Winston Churchill) who is chastised by a woman for being drunk who then retorts "Yes, but in the morning, I will be sober and you will still be ugly", he encouraged the audience to "turn ugly problems into drunk ones".

Other Writeups

There are a couple of review of the conference:

• at Meta Stack Overflow
• at Geoffrey Wiseman’s blog, Tech Scene

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be “booth-bunnying” today and tomorrow at the Microsoft area of the Explore Design fair, which bills itself as “North America’s first design education fair for youth”. It’s an event where young people can find out about the creative, technical and career possibilities offered by the field of design. There’s a wide range of design disciplines represented at Explore Design, including:

• Video/game design
• Furniture design
• Architectural design
• Industrial design
• Textile design
• Fashion design
• Interior design
• Graphic design

Explore Design takes place today and tomorrow (Wednesday, October 14th and Thursday, October 15th) at the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I’m going to be spending most of my booth-bunnying near the XBoxes, where I’ll be talking about XNA and Xbox Live Indie Games.

Depending on the internet access situation at the Convention Centre and how busy it gets at the booth, I’ll be posting dispatches either from Explore Design during the day or in the evening once I get back home. Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the features at the TechDays cross-country conference is the “Ask the Experts” booth, which is staffed all day by speakers (when they aren’t speaking, naturally) and other local tech experts. They’re there to answer attendee questions about Microsoft tools and technologies, tech trends, the industry in general, the local job scene and so on.

While riffling through the photos I shot over the past couple of weeks, I found these ones I took when I passed the “Ask the Experts” booth at TechDays Toronto and saw the trio of Sean Kearney, Steve Syfuhs and Mitch Garvis. I took one look at them, said “Uh-oh, Trouble Incorporated!”, and snapped these pics. I thought you might enjoy them:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As I write this, we’re getting into the final session of TechDays Toronto, which in my track – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform – features SharePoint guru Reza Alirezaei doing his presentation, Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint.

If you ask me the question “What is SharePoint?”, I’d most likely give you a description that sounds like this:

Here’s a more accurate description of what SharePoint is:

Reza’s session takes a look at another aspect of SharePoint: as a platform on which you can build and deploy custom web services that other clients can call upon.

Once his session’s done, TechDays Toronto will wrap up and then the tear-down process begins.

Next stop: Halifax on November 2nd and 3rd!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Right now (at the time of this writing) at the Toronto edition of the TechDays cross-Canada conference, in the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, is Bruce Johnson – “the speaker so nice, we put him on twice!” – talking to the audience about Building RESTful Applications Using WCF.

REST – as in REpresentational State Transfer – while a big thing for a lot of developers, is still only gaining traction in the Microsoft world, in which a lot of resource access is done with SOAP. Since Microsoft is more about interoperability these days, it’s important to get developers building on the Microsoft platform up to speed with REST and different ways to build RESTful services using Microsoft technologies, whether it’s ASP.NET MVC or Bruce’s area of expertise, WCF, Windows Communications Foundation.

Bruce is playing to a full room, which is a good sign – it’s good to see developers interested in learning new things!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.