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As much as I wanted to get this posted, you know, Saturday, I just didn’t have time. After the birds of a feather, I spent a good bit of time chatting with Justin Gehtland about Ajax, Ruby, and Mac tricks so my whole evening was delayed. Of course after spending 10 hours drinking down the tech love, I just couldn’t convince myself to open the laptop. Speaking of which, I’m a bit behind on my email and whatnot so if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, my apologies! Though the BoF started as a Spring/AOP discussion, it devolved into a Rails/Ruby and why Mac’s are better talk. I asked what would be more likely in two years - that we’d all be using AOP or we’d be programming in Ruby; needless to say, this got quite rise out of Justin! BTW, for those of you that think there’s no money to be made with Ruby…well, just ask Justin what he’s been up to these days (and they are some impressive apps!)

On the people front, I ran into a few more folks I knew including Mike Calvo (I swear, he asked a great question in every session he was in) and I also had a chance to chat with David Hussman - what a great guy! You know, this year I really found myself wishing for more time between sessions to talk with people. Anyway, on to the show…

I began my day with Venkat’s refactoring talk and as I expected, it was great! I really can’t say enough good things about Venkat’s presentation style - it really is a pleasure. I especially liked his reference to On Writing Well and its principles of simplicity, clarity, brevity, and most importantly, humanity. I couldn’t help but think that we spend way too much of our time worrying about the computer when in truth we need to write for our fellow developers. I like to follow the homicidal maniac theory - in other words, I pretend that the person maintaining my code is a serial killer and he knows where I live so on the off chance he’s digging through my code at 2 am, I’d like him to think happy thoughts about me. Anyway, as I expected a great talk with live coding (damn, IntelliJ is sweet).

After that, I sat in on Justin Gehtland’s talk on JavaScript. I have to admit, I was quite interested to see Justin in person. You see on Day 1, I spent my entire afternoon in the break out room next to his and all I have to say is, the man is passionate! A couple of times I swear he was channeling Emeril (BAM!) and I even detected a couple of Jim Cramer-esque BOOYAs… Needless to say, I was *not* disappointed. I cannot say enough good things about Justin (and I’m not just saying that because he recommends our book.) Not only did he fill me on his Mac must haves (TextMate, Desktop Manager, and Quicksilver) but he’s also a foody! We both share a passion for cooking, FoodTV and Alton Brown. If you *ever* have a chance to see Justin live (like, say, RailsConf), do not hesitate.

In the afternoon is was back to the phenomenal David Geary for Ajaxian Faces and Hands on Rails. In both sessions, David did a fair amount of live coding and it was impressive. Sure, I know he had a lot of the code hiding in IntelliJ’s smart templates and what not but still…pretty darn impressive. Of course how he handled things not working was quite something - very cool under pressure. I enjoyed watching someone else covering Ajax and I’m becoming more and more impressed with JSF but I’m not quite ready to eat the 7-layer burrito… Of course the Rails session was amazing but I was surprised by two things - how few people actually went (I really expected a packed room) and the fact that there was only one session the entire weekend on Ruby and Rails combined… No matter how many times I see it, Rails still impresses me. When you watch someone code an entire application, live, in just a few minutes, well, it gets your attention.

Couple of other comments on David Geary’s talks. First, he takes advantage of a great Mac feature - the Universal Access panel - to magnify portions of his screen so folks in the back could read the code. Rather than tweak his font settings, he just zoomed in! Very slick - I am going to have to use this next time I present code. Another interesting point, David has a fascinating hobby - French. Yes, he has his language set not to English, but to French… Way cool!

Well, I think that about covers Day 2…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Ajax, Development, Software, Talks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.