It’s been an amazing month. I had the opportunity to take a tour around Europe speaking about Silverlight. I got to see a lot of different countries, speak to a lot of different people, hear a lot of different visions and opinions and really experience how global of a company Microsoft truly is.

First, let me just say thanks to Beat Schwegler who set up the whole trip. He has an interesting role. He is the technical leader for DPE in Western Europe. He’s a great mentor and I’ve learned a lot from him.

So what was I talking about? I was really talking about building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight from an architect’s perspective. The first part of the talk is really more about usability and user centric design than it is Silverlight in specific. The second part of the talk is an expanded version of a talk that I first did with Mike Labriola and later with James Ward. I added a ton of specific material about Silverlight to it. The whole deck is up on slide share and embedded below.

Spain

I started off my trip in Spain. Madrid to be exact. I had a few days to adjust to the jet lag before I had to speak. This was cool because I got to see a little of Madrid and get to know the people. This included, among others, Cesar De la Torre Llorente, Isabel Gomez Miragaya, David Salgado Bermejo and their manager Enrique Fernández.

I started off the “work” portion of the trip by doing a couple of interviews. The first of these was with a CIO magazine called Computing Magazine. I probably went a little too poindexter on the poor reporter on top of the slight language problem. Overall though, Cesar was pleased with the interview. The second interview was, thankfully for me, with a technical guy who runs a technical magazine out of Spain called .NET Mania.

For my public session, it was packed with close to a hundred people. They had very slightly overbooked the room anticipating some drop-off but there was a lot less drop-off than they usually get so it was jammed. The session went well, despite the language barrier. Beat had warned me that of all the countries, Spain would be the biggest issue as people speak less English there than anywhere else on my trip. France would be a close second but that wasn’t a scheduled stop. I just spoke as clearly and slowly as I could (and got thanked for it on the break). Even so, Cesar ran though a quick high level version of my session in Spanish as soon as I was done.

Many more pictures from Spain found in the sets Random Pictures from Spain and Speaking in Spain.

Switzerland

After my session, I flew to Switzerland where I spoke at the partner council meeting organized by Ronnie Saurenmann and Stefano Malle from the Swiss DPE team. There were about 15 consultants from around Zurich that were there including Atif Aziz who I know from way back when I was doing a lot of training and Laurent Bunion who had just finished writing a new book called Silverlight 2 Unleashed for Sams. They obviously were prepared for the session and asked a ton of really tough question. It was cool though to see the excitement around the technologies. I want to send a big thanks out to Christian Gross who set me up with a user group meeting at Credit Suisse. I love talking about dynamic languages. Here I got to talk to the group about IronRuby and IronPython following a short session that Christian did on F# and the functional programming concepts in C#. It was a smart crowd with good questions.

Afterwards, I got to spend the weekend at my friend Christian’s house. We went hiking through the mountains and even saw this slick looking motorcycle outside of a Swiss custom bike shop…

More Pictures from Switzerland found in Random Pictures from Switzerland.

Denmark

Next up was JAOO in Denmark. We started out the week with a dinner organized by the Microsoft guys from Denmark including Daniel Mellgaard Frost and Martin Esmann.

JAOO was an awesome conference and I was honored to be part of it. They had an amazing number of industry greats:

• Anders Hejlsberg, Technical Fellow, Microsoft
• Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks
• Neal Ford, Ruby Shepherd at ThoughtWorks
• Lars Bak, Google Inc. – one of the authors of the V8 JavaScript engine for Chrome
• Michael T. Nygard, Author of “Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software”
• Joe Duffy, Microsoft – author of the Parallel Extensions for .NET
• Erik Meijer, Microsoft – Architect of Volta, parts of LINQ and much more
• Glenn Vanderburg, Relevance Consulting
• and the list goes on – check the rest of th
  em at http://jaoo.dk/aarhus-2008/speakers/

One of the things that I did was a joint session with James Ward from Adobe on the best and worst practices of building RIAs. We had about 175 people in this talk. The great thing about this talk is that when we are talking about applications, there are many practices that we can talk about. I’m prepping a much longer post with that deck that will go up later today or tomorrow.

Following that, I talked about Silverlight specifically with about about 150 people and had a full day tutorial on Friday with about 15 people. The tutorial was interesting as my video adapter on my laptop got damaged and I had to borrow one of the student’s computer. The interesting part there was me struggling through on a Danish keyboard… Definitely a different layout for all of the special characters.

I loved Denmark. The people were over the top friendly. After a dinner at Klassic 65, James Ward and I wanted to go grab a scotch before heading to bed. Sorin, the owner who had already dipped into his private wine collection for us, was trying to give us directions to a great scotch place. When we failed the test with all of his usual landmarks, he said – “Ok, then I’ll take you” and piled us all into his station wagon and drove us across town to the scotch place. That was cool! I really dug Klassic as they cook in the old ways. According to what I understood from Sorin, the cooks and much of the wait staff have to pass a certification test. Part of the testing is this antiquated set of methods that include doing the Flambé at the table with the crepes and so on. However, after doing it for the test, none of the restaurants actually use this knowledge. Sorin decided to go for it. His little shop has limited room and a very short set of dishes. They typically offer 4 starters, 4 entrees and 4 desserts and they do those few items amazingly well. The wine choices are far more plentiful. Sorin is a master as picking the wine for the meal.

I have to go back to JAOO every year just so that I get to go back to Denmark.

More pictures from Denmark found in the sets Klassic 65 in Aarhus, Speaking at JAOO with James Ward and Denmark.

Sweden

I love Sweden. One of the conditions that I had for taking on the trip in the first place was that I get to spend a weekend in Sweden. It turned out that Richard Hale Shaw was wrapping up a class in Stockholm the day I arrived. We hung out that evening and had dinner at very cool local Jazz club.

Unfortunately, it rained all day Sunday. That aside, it was a great day. I had dinner in the old town (Gamla Stan) and hung out people watching all day. It’s one of my favorite pastimes.

Monday I met up with the local evangelism team, including Jonas Torstendahl and Robert Folkesson.

I did a public session at the Sheraton with about 50 people. It was a great audience – mostly consultants that came with solid questions. One of the attendees had actually already been doing quite a bit of Silverlight including a Greeting Card application that they are working on getting ready for release on Codeplex.

*update* – the Greeting Creator is on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/greetingcreator.

More pictures from Sweden found in the set Views from the Nordic Light in Sweden and Speaking in Sweden.

Belgium

I really wish that I had more time in Belgium and in Holland but I only had a day each. I got in on Monday night and was on the train Tuesday night. In the mean time, I got to meet several of the Belgian evangelists, including Philippe Destoop, and do a public session. I really liked the facility that we were in. It’s called Living Tomorrow and it’s all about the future of sustainable technologies. They had a set of solar panels out front that had an LED display that showed how much energy it had generated and how much of that energy had been used. The whole venue was the latest and greatest technologies from a number of different companies. They had touch panels on all of the refrigerators to show the ingredients. They had automated lights and lighting control in the auditorium. They had automated lawn mowers. They had an amazing amount of cool tech.

More pictures from Belgium found in Random Pictures from Belgium and Speaking in Belgium.

Holland

Next up was Holland. I took the train into Amsterdam and then caught a cab out to near Barneveld where the session happened the next day. I stayed in a cool little spa type of an hotel that was nice and old school. Right down to the old fashioned iron key for my hotel.

The next day I caught a lift to the venue with Mark Voermans. It was an interesting session because part of the crowd was brand new to the technologies and was really interested in the first part of the session but lost in the second part. The other part of the crowd is already actively doing Silverlight development and was bored to tears in the first part and rapt in the second half. 

Following the public session, we had a two more meetings. One was an interview with Web Designer Magazine. Here I was joined by Martin Tirion, Holland’s User Experience Evangelist. The second one was with one of the TV stations to discuss their systems.

More pictures from Holland found in the set Speaking in Holland.

Ir
eland

From Holland I flew to Ireland. This was the final stop on the work tour. I started off with a long meeting with Sean Foley, the evangelism manager for Ireland. He had a tremendous amount of great insight into the the tech industry, Microsoft, politics and a ton more. It was great to meet him and learn from him.

I had a number of side meetings during the day and an evening event. The meetings were with two different training companies that are ramping up for Silverlight and a company that’s been doing Silverlight application development since Silverlight Alpha 1.1 called Zignals. They have a pretty cool set of chart controls specifically tailored for the financial industry. They had some really deep and technical questions. I’m hoping that I was able to help them out…

The next meeting was also really cool – Martha Rotter, the local DE, had set up an interview with a lot of the local dynamic languages folk from around Dublin. That included Ana Nelson from Ruby Ireland, Jaime Hemmett from PHP Ireland, and Sean O’Donnell and Vishal Vatsa from Python Ireland.

That was a ton of fun. I’ll be posting that on WiresideChat soon.

Last stop was the public session that I did in Ireland with about 75 people in attendance. It was a varied group ranging from consultants to people that work on the Live platform for Microsoft out of the Dublin office. It was impressive how many people came with good and solid questions ready to ask. There was even a couple of people with written lists of questions that they wanted to make sure that they wanted to get answered. Martha told me afterwards that the crowd is usually very reserved and doesn’t ask a lot of questions – but they were really enthusiastically engaged during my session.

More pictures from Ireland found in the sets Dynamic Languages in Ireland and Speaking in Dublin.

Conclusion

I learned a ton from my trip and hopefully was able to help people out. I’d love to hear from those that were in the various sessions about how they are applying anything that I talked about.

I’ve been speaking at a lot of different events recently and I keep having to put together a bio. Some events want short bios, some want long bios. To help me more than anything else, I thought I’d post a couple of different lengths of bios out here so that I had a nice easy to point people to collection.

Micro Bio
Passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. Currently employed by Microsoft.

Short Bio
Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as a UX Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a UX or Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at https://joshholmes.com.

Longer and more self serving Bio
Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as a UX Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a UX or Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant with SRT Solutions working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. In most situations, Josh was called in as the technical leader on a project to lead the clients team to success. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences, including VSLive, Software Development Expo (East and West), Basta and the Rich Web Experience,  focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Josh has written and delivered many training classes over time for both public audiences as  well as courses tightly tailored for the clients needs. The topics of these classes ranged from XML to ASP.NET to the Compact Framework. Josh speaks from his experience and conviction based on many production successes that his clients have experienced. Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at https://joshholmes.com.

You can contact me at josh.holmes@microsoft.com.

I wrote a write up for eRubyCon 2008 Day 1 and eRubyCon 2008 Day 2.

BTW – thank you to Jerry Nummi for all of the great pictures of eRubyCon. I haven’t had time to browse and put them in this post but I’ll do that tonight or tomorrow.

*Update – I added pictures…*

I’m sitting in the back of day 3 reflecting on the previous two days. It’s amazing the group of people that Joe has put together here to speak on Ruby in the enterprise.

– Joe O’Brien started up the day with his DSL talk. I’ve heard the talk before but it’s still a fantastic talk. His sub-title on the talk “Why I love Ruby”. I like to add “(and Emacs chest thumping)” but that’s me… 🙂

I’m not going to explain DSLs here because I wrote about them after hearing this talk the first time at https://joshholmes.com/2008/04/25/DomainSpecificLanguagesDSL.aspx.

Honestly, part of what is so great about the talk is that Joe is just infectious in his passion and delivery. He, like a lot of great speakers, is a story teller. He told stories that ranged from past work in tech to past work prepping food displays for a cruise liner.

One of the stories that he told was about a large company that he did some consulting work for. They realized that the core issues at the company really came down to two people being able to communicate – a DBA and an Accountant. The issue was that they weren’t speaking the same language. One was speaking in rows, columns, triggers, sprocs and so on. The other was speaking in points, rates, forecasts and so on. The solution was to write an ORM that the accountant could understand that the DBA could work with. This came in the form of a DSL.

The food story was that the great sculptures on the table displays are actually food – not really edible but food non-the-less. It’s made from refined beef fat. There are many different forms, some softer and more moldable and some closer to marble than clay, and depending on what was needed, the master sculpture would pick a different form. Similarly, Joe picks a language that he can shape and mold to his needs. That’s what Ruby is for him.

Back to Emacs, one of the reasons that Joe loves Emacs is that you can shape the commands and key-bindings and the whole environment to shape your way of working rather than the other way around. I’m still not convinced. My biggest problem with Emacs is that the learning curve before you can be even mildly productive is giant. I understand that once you climb that mountain that the view is nice. I’m just not convinced that the incremental jump over my current tools will be enough to be worth it.

Interested in the talk? You can watch it from when Joe did it at the Mountain West Ruby conference.

– Chris Wanstrath followed Joe with a talk about GitHub. They have taken the Git source control and given it a centralized source server. The reality, as he explained it, with Git is that every person has a full blown copy of the repository. The interesting part is that people can go client to server or they can go peer to peer or any combination that you can possibly imagine. When they want to make a change, they actually fork the project.
Especially with the Git peer to peer checkins, it’s actually not a checkin. Nobody actually has write access to anyone else’s Git repository. When they are ready, they let the other devs know that they should pull and merge. They way that it works all the way up the list is that there are devs that make changes who let the project managers know that they should pull. That project manager is the “blessed version”.
The simplest explanation of GitHub is that it gives the individual programmer an offsite repository so that they don’t have to be online when the other members want to make a pull.  

– Jim Weirich did the lunch time keynote called “What the Enterprise Can Learn From Your Mom”. In the spirit of the previous talk, he told us that all of his slides were up on GitHub already. He started out talking about Moores law. The first thing that he points out is that the number of transistors on the chip doesn’t mean that the chips will be faster – it might, and does in current times, mean that we get more cores. There’s a possibility of 100 core processors in the near future. Similar to our moms, we will have to learn how to do more and more things at one time. The fun part is that most people don’t know how to write multi-threaded applications… Jim went on to do a fantastic explanation of race conditions and threading at large. Somewhere in here I missed part of the talk trying to track down why the air-conditioning was not on. As I walked back in Jim was telling war stories about collecting real time data off of a jet engine in a multi-threading system. They designed a system that would only fail one in a million times – except that it was collecting data about a million times a day – oops. They had designed the system to fail once a day. Back to the drawing board…
Then Jim shifted gears. He started talking about “Blub Programmers” and languages other than Ruby. Jim is definitely the guy to do this. Jim is always playing with some bizarre language that would twist a normal brain like a pretzel.
First language that he talked about was Erlang. It’s a bizarre language. For example, you loop by writing tail recursion functions and most of the communication is done by sending process messages. The next language that he talked about was Closure Clojure (thanks Stuart Halloway for the correction). The interesting part about it, especially in light of the rest of his talk, is that it’s got different types of variables that are aware of multi-threading inherently.

– Michael Letterle followed Jim’s session with a session on IronRuby. To be far, I was supposed to follow Jim. However, I convinced to sw
itch me and Michael because I thought his talk was more core IronRuby than mine and would free me up to concentrate on Silverlight more than spending my time talking strictly about IronRuby. I was right and I liked the order. But I do deserve the comment that Michael started with where he called me an “ass” for making him get up right after Jim Weirick who is a phenomenal speaker.

Michael is one of the community contributor to the IronRuby project and has done a lot of work. He started with a lot of discussion about how the culture at Microsoft is shifting to be more and more open. With projects like CodePlex and Port25, there’s a lot of great new things.
Michael ran a lot of the test that were run at the Ruby Shootout in 2007 to see the differences and where things are now. While the functionality was largely complete, the perf was not great. It was a little worse than twice as slow as Jruby and MRI. As it’s still in beta and heavily under development, I’m not dismayed by that at the moment. If that’s still the case in a year, I will be.
Michael’s take on the talk was that since IronRuby is Iron, we should look at it with battleship grey windows applications. 🙂 He was adamant that there be an IronRuby talk that wasn’t about web technologies. He wrote a small windows app that hits a database and does normal IO type work similar to any and every enterprise application out there in the world. The next thing he did is fire up ir.cmd which is the IronRuby’s interpreted runtime. Then he attached to the running windows application and modified the application’s GUI and business logic to include tax information. Some of the cool things that he did was opening up base class library items and started adding Ruby things to them. For example, he added method_missing to the base Windows.Forms.Form class.

It’s awesome that there are guys like Michael out there in the world that are passionate Microsoft, Open Source, Ruby, .NET, Enterprise and Community. He’s a great ambassador from one world to the next carrying those passions with him everywhere he goes.

– I followed Michael talking about Ruby in the Browser through Silverlight. I started out by talking about what evangelists do. After that I talked about User Experience and what that means to software. Then I started talking about some companies where the user experience, and their use of Silverlight, are making a great difference. I showed off the Olympics and the Hard Rock Cafe live and online. Then I pulled up some of the great work that Jimmy Schementi has been doing with a project that he calls Silverline. It’s pretty fantastic – it’s a number of different IronRuby samples running in Silverlight. The one that I missed showing and discussing was the idea of moving the controller in a Rails app out to the browser with IronRuby. Oh well. Next year.

I think that my talk was well received but welcome any comments. 

– Lance Carlson followed my session and closed out eRubyCon with a talk about an open source project that he’s writing called Anvil. It’s a framework for creating desktop applications that’s platform agnostic. The goal is to wrap all of the possible desktop frameworks from Shoes to RubyCocoa in one common framework. It’s a very interesting idea.

– Closing thoughts. Joe O’Brien did a fantastic job putting together this whole conference. The quality of the program, the speakers, the logistics, the whole package is fantastic every year. This is one of the highlights of the year for me every year. The other absolutely non-negotiable item on my calendar is CodeMash. The ton and the maturity of the conference coupled with the passion that not only the speakers show but the attendees as well is unparalleled

It’s an honor to me that Joe has invited me to come and associate with this group of elite and influential speakers/friends/attendees/geeks/passionate people that makes up the Ruby community. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know everyone at the conference.

I was thrilled that Joe wanted to host the event at the Microsoft offices in Columbus. We’re not going to be able to do that next year because we’ll overflow the venue but this year is was the perfect size. We can fit about 120 in the bigger meeting room without having to sit on laps and we had right at 106 in there. It was full but not crazy.

Last year, Joe closed with question as to whether or not they were going to do it again. This year, Joe ended with a definitive – “We’ll be announcing dates soon for next year, keep an eye on http://www.erubycon.com or the mailing list”. Me… I’m very happy about that.

Yesterday I wrote a write up of eRubyCon 2008 Day 1.

– Charles Nutter started up with JRuby. I’m always impressed by people that are able to make their weekend project their full time job. I was further impressed that Charles was up with the rest of the speakers until closer to 4am than any of us should really admit, drinking really good scotch and solving the world’s problems.

Charles talked about the JVM and Java as both a problem and a great asset. There are a lot of people that look at the J in JRuby and automatically associate it with all of the things that they don’t like about Java. Charles answer is to separate the JVM from the Java language. He did a really good job of talking about the things that the JVM brings over the standard Ruby runtimes such as world class garbage collection, memory compaction, thread handling and the like. He did a number of really compelling demos around threading in particular. One of the things that he said here is that JRuby and IronRuby are really the only Ruby implementations that are able to do native threads because they are the only ones that are built on production quality VMs that handle that native threading for them.

One of the great quotes was “We write a lot of Java. So you don’t have to…” – Charles Nutter

After setting the stage, he pulled up a long list of features and said – “There’s way too much for me to cover in the time left – what do you want to see?”. that was fun. The first suggestion that he showed was 2D graphics that flashed a bunch of little balls around the screen. It was even responsive to voice commands. The second suggestion was to show Rails running on JRuby. He showed that they are running Rails on Ruby 1.8.6 (java). Next he brought up image_voodoo to do more 2D libraries. Lastly, he showed “java_inline” which allows you to inline Java code similar to the Ruby_inline which allows you to inline C right in your Ruby code.

  – Evan Light came up next. Unfortunately I was putting out a few small fires. Fortunately Michael Lettere wrote up a small write up so that I could include it here.

Evan Light hates EJBs.
EJB encourages difficult to test idioms, private fields, private static final fields.
Nice demo code “public class DeepThought” <— How do you test that?
You COULD shoot the guy who wrote it, but don’t do that.
Very good use of humor, engaged the audience.

– The lunch keynote was Neal Ford. Neil Ford is an amazing speaker. What’s cool about him is that every time I see him speaker, I wonder how he could get any better. And then he does. Today’s talk was about complexity. One of the core concepts that he talked about is the idea of Language Lockdown. It’s when language writers put in features to protect people from themselves and cut down on the stupid things that you can do. The idea is that if you do that the lower end (read cheaper) developers will still be productive. “What they are trying to do is strap a rocket to the ass of a turtle. What they are actually doing is putting chains on the rabbits than can go fast.”
The problem with that take though is two fold. First, it is not a linear line between the top developers and the lower end developers. What that means is that on the curve, a highly productive programmer will get done in one day what it will take an average developer more than a week to do and the weak developer a month or more. To point out the second issue, Neal quoted one of my other favorite speaker – “Bad developers will move heaven and earth to do the wrong thing” – Glenn Vanderburgh
One of the huge questions that he put out there is “How much of your enterprise software simple services accidental complexity?”. It’s a great question.
As he was wrapping up, he left us with the thought that “Courage is contagious. Cowardice is infectious”.

– Following Neal was Stuart Halloway again. He was talking this time about how one can fail with 100% test coverage. It’s an interesting topic because for so many people, 100% test coverage is the holy grail that they shoot for. The first thing that he pointed out is that you might cover all the lines, but not all the branches so it depends on how you measure things to get to 100% coverage. The second thing that he points out is that you can cover all the code, but not all the corner cases. The example that he used is testing if a value is above or below $25.00 but forgetting $25.00 even. Oops. Then you can start writing way too much code and too much complexity into your tests. Now you need to test your tests and you’ve taken too much time writing them. Then he talked about the “ugly mirror” where the test is really a mirror of the code where you’re covering the line but using the code that you are trying to test while testing – oh dear I have a headache. This is where he says that you are allowed to write literals in your tests.
Neal Ford piped in – “It’s ok for your test to be moist, not drenched”.
The next topic was slow tests and how dangerous they are. The short version of the issue is that if the unit tests don’t run in under 1 second, developers are not going to run them. Functional tests should run in under 2 minutes. If they don’t, then factor them so that they run on different schedules, parallelize them on different machines to get the normal check-in process back under the 2 minute mark if possible.
The last type of fail that he talked about is shallow tests. The quote that he referenced is “No automated test suite can ever replace exploratory testing.” – Jay Fields. The goal is that once the unit and functional testing passes, that people will put themselves in the clients seat and go spelunking and try out a bunch of stuff.

– The next talk was a very unique idea called “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Modeling Systems”. They wrote a play! The guys from EdgeCase, Joe O’Brien, Jim Weirich and Chris Nelson, acted out a normal project for them. They started out on twitter talking about the new project that they just landed. Then they actually started with the early on meetings that they have. Joe played the cowboy dev lead who insists that it’s a “simple rails app” and decides to do a data first model. Chris played clueless nub and Jim played the seasoned architect that was concerned about requirements analysis, separation of layers and behavior driven models. Joe, ready to start slamming code out, starts pairing with Chris. The first thing that they tackle is a simple calendar event. Then they have to schedule r
eoccuring events. Joe, the cowboy, just decides to replicate the events in order to do the reoccurence. The next requirement is rescheduling the reoccuring meetings…. Oops. They have neatly coded themselves into a corner and start hacking out a solution. At that point, Chris decided to take a walk and went to see what Jim thought of it all. Jim started writing out CRC cards and started thinking about higher level ideas, bringing in light-weight design patterns around temporal expressions from Martin Fowler and so on. Jim, the architect, is blithely ignoring “implementation details” such as where to store the data and performance. When performance sucked – they went back to the drawing board. Jim and Joe had to eventually come together. Of course the answer was to write a DSL… 🙂
Great talk. The good news is that Neal Ford is following them so there won’t be a let down as we end the day…

– The last talk of the day was Neal Ford talking about Design Patterns in Ruby. One of the things that he pointed out fairly early on is that the Design Patterns book, even according to one of the authors ( Vlissides), should have been called “Making C++ Suck Less”. Even the Smalltalk that’s in the book was really C++ written in Smalltalk syntax. He covered a number of different patterns including the Iterator and the Interpretor pattern. There were a number of circumstances where he pointed out that the issues addressed by the pattern were addressed by the Ruby language. For example, the interpretor pattern’s intent is really addressed by DLSs which are dead easy to implement in Ruby. The only problem with this session is that it’s at the end of the day and my brain is a little mush at this point.

I’m sitting here at the second Enterprise Ruby Conference (eRubyCon). There’s a couple of fun and interesting things that have happened this year.

One of them that’s exciting for me is that the whole event is being hosted at the Microsoft facilities in Columbus, OH. Joe O’Brien was looking for a facility so I offered up the office since we can get that for free. There are some minor facility issues, such as the internet access is fairly limited due to the Microsoft security policies. We got that mostly sorted by renting a number of cell card based routers from iBox2Go. It’s not a perfect solution because we’re at about double the recommended number of users per router. That’s caused network to be a touch spotty but it’s better than non-existent.

Another thing that’s a ton of fun is that we’ve doubled the number of attendees. The conference room here at the Microsoft office is FULL. Tomorrow I’ll show some pictures from the conference room. It’s really cool to see.

The whole event is going very well. Joe has been plagued with speakers having travel issues and the like. For example, Stu Halloway was supposed to do a lunch time keynote but was thrown off as his plane had mechanical issues. The great news is that this is an Agile conference and everyone is used to requirements changing mid-project and Joe was able to shuffle the speakers.

 – First up was Randall Thomas from the Engine Yard. He was talking about ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). He did a masterful job of making that important topic interesting and fun. It’s a fundamental topic but even Randall equated it to Bob Ross painting trees and it was tough to keep people awake talking about the best possible way to make one string into two and two into one…

– Next was Tom Mornini. I wish I had been able to stick around for this talk. He talked heavily about Vertebra, Scalability and Accountability.

– Anthony Eden followed Tom with a session on Identity Management. It was interesting to hear his take on OpenID, InformationCard, SAML and how Ruby works with those. The good news for Ruby is that it does really well with and is leading the way with OpenID. The bad news is that the things that are done inside of an enterprise are a little less prevalent in the Ruby at the moment. It was a great tutorial on the state of

– Giles Bowkett talked about Meta-Programming vs. Code Generation. He had a fun and deep tirade on something called Monkeypatching.

“A monkey patch (also spelled monkey-patch, MonkeyPatch) is a way to extend or modify the runtime code of dynamic languages (e.g. Smalltalk, Javascript, Objective-C, Ruby, Perl, and Python) without altering the original source code.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch

This is meta-programming at it’s finest. He then went on to talk about meta-monkey-patching or meta meta programming… Somewhere in there I got a headache. That’s about the time that he brought it back to Code Generation. My favorite quote, other than “Here’s a completely gratuitous picture of Jessica Albert” (which did come with a gratuitous picture of Jessica Albert…) ” “Should I hire a programmer or should I just write one?”. He gave an example of a past job at NY Times where he left after he wrote a “mini-giles”. That’s a code generator that did much of what he had been doing until he wrote the generator. The “mini-giles” meme has really taken off since then and has been worked into a ton of the talks and conversations…

– Stuart Halloway followed Giles with a keynote called “Ending Legacy Code in Our Lifetime”. He had one of the better starts that I’ve ever heard – “Legacy Code is like Porn. I know it when I see it. It’s ubiquitous on the internet. And like all porn, it’s ultimately unsatisfying”. (At least he has it on good authority that porn is ultimately unsatisfying). One of the things that Stuart points out is that code can be broken down to Ceremony and Essence. The Essence is what you actually want to get done. The Ceremony is the stuff that you have to do in order to have the Essence work. For example, if you have gone from “New” on an object to writing factories – the reality is the factory is Ceremony. End of the day, all you really wanted is an object.

Another great quote from Stuart was “Ceremony leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to pain. Pain leads to Ceremony.” The goal, according to Stuart, is to have as little ceremony as possible and have every line of code contribute to the Essence. And right now, Ruby is the closest answer as it’s got a fairly high Essence to Ceremony ratio.

His talk was chock full of great quotes – “What authority authorizes this in the Ruby world? – ME – and I’m Right”. It was full enough of great quotes that there’s a Stu Halloway Quote Tracker.

– Brian Sam-Bodden, always a great speaker, closed out the day with Refactoring with JRuby. He talked about the core of refactoring is having a great suite of tests. One of my favorite quotes from him was “Since I’m a Java consultant, I have a lot of work to do…”.

Overall, it was a great day. I really enjoyed catching up with a lot of the guys that I don’t get to see at the .NET community events. I’m hoping that most of these guys will be at CodeMash cause that will give me 2 times a year to hang out.

Moonlight is still continuing to progress. Moonlight is the open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux. It’s being run by Miguel de Icaza of Novell.

There are a couple of things that are interesting to me about this project.

First, as I talked about in Dancing in the Moonlight!, it’s unprecedented interop and openness on the part of Microsoft. Microsoft gave the project the specs and a ton of support. The Moonlight devs even have access to the Silverlight engineers as they are developing the open source compatible solution to help clarifying specs and ensuring compatibility. One of the things that’s tough from a legal perspective is all of the codecs and other video components. What’s going to happen is that there’s a “Media Pack” that users will download from Microsoft to play videos. This circumvents the legal issues and allows Moonlight users access to all the great VC1 video out there.

Second thing I find interesting is that they are finding interesting ways to innovate even in the constraints of being 100% compatible. For example, They built a Silverlight designer called Lunar Eclipse completely in Silverlight. That’s a really cool idea. They are looking at offline ideas around Moonlight and making their implementation a WPF light enabling them to revamp the GNOME’s desktop development paradigm. They’ve started with desklets, which are small Silverlight components that run in a desktop framwork. Again, really innovative idea.

Miguel did an interview with derStandard.at about the projects and how they are going at Miguel de Icaza on Mono. 

There’s something surreal about blogging by the campfire watching the sun rise. I’m out with my boys on a guys day out. Ok, I didn’t post this from the campfire but I could have since I had cell signal and can tether my phone… But I resisted the urge. What you’ve got here is what I happened to jot down while my boys were sleeping.

It’s been a while since I really went camping. I did it once last year but before that it had been at least 10 years. I grew up camping every summer. It’s been a goal of mine to get back to camping more often. This week, I promised my boys that we’d get out and do a guys night out. We packed up the tent and hit the grocery store to pick up hot dogs, marshmallows and all the essential camping supplies.

We learned two lessons that I thought I’d share. I’m sure that at some point, these stories and lessons will make it into a talk but for now, they will have to stand on their own.

Smores
One of the fantastic lessons that we learned on this trip is that even a bad smore is really good. I mean it really doesn’t matter if it’s neat or messy, if it has too much chocolate (as if there is such a state), the marshmallow is burnt or just lukewarm or anything other variation. There are really only two ways to screw up a smore. You can burn yourself and you can obsess about creating the perfect smore but if you relax and just let things flow, you really can’t screw it up.

This was especially evident as my 10 year old was war dancing around the fire singing – “I like mine crunchy crunchy… I like mine crunchy crunchy…” carrying his mighty marshmallow torch burning his black as the night while my 12 year old was searching for that perfect golden brown. The really good news was that when my 12 year old accidentally set his on fire – he wasn’t upset because it meant that he got to eat his smore quicker…

The lesson here is to stop trying for perfection. There are many different things in life where the only real way to screw it up is to obsess over it.

Second Fire
The second thing that we learned is that the second fire is a lot easier to start than the first. I remember as a kid around the age of 12 that I would get up before my parents and get the morning fire started. I thought I was so brilliant because it wouldn’t take long for me to get a nice little fire going. I would contrast that to the night before where my father had spent the better part of an hour getting the fire going, building up from newspaper to leaves to small twigs to medium sized sticks to real logs at some point, carefully coaxing the embers all along and creating a great bed for the fire.

I’ve created a number of fires since then and have come to understand the rituals that my father taught me when I was young. I was reminded, once again, last night that it’s not as easy as I thought as a kid to get that first fire going. The tough part is building up the strong base of solid and consistent heat from the bed of embers. Once that’s going, the fire will provide a wonderful glowing heat late into the night. As my father did, I buried the bed of embers in ashes.

When I got up this morning, well before the sunrise with a wonderful dew covering the ground, I went about the task of starting a fire to cook breakfast on. As when I was a kid, I scraped back the ashes and laid down a piece of the newspaper on the coals and before I could get the matches, it caught fire. I found myself scrambling to get twigs before it went out. Those caught fire instantly which set fire to the larger sticks and the logs. In a matter of 5 minutes or so, I was ready to cook breakfast. That was fantastic!

The lesson here is that if something is really easy, it’s often because the path has already been paved. Don’t compare your success with those that did it the first time.

Just Some Observations
Man I’ve gotten soft. Muscles that I had forgotten about are sore and I slept on an air mattress. How was my father not this sore? He took all of us camping and slept on the rocks in a sleeping bag. Honestly, as I get older and am trying to raise my children, I’m getting more and more impressed with my father.

Camping has gotten modern. There’s electricity, modern plumbing and costs $24 a night. For those playing the home game, that’s $168 a week or $672 a month. I could rent an apartment around here for that. I need to find some place more “rustic” and cheaper if we’re going to do this a lot more often.

I thought long and hard about how to write this post. There are a ton of people that have inspired me throughout my life.

I was inspired by Jeff Blankenburg‘s Contribupendence Day. I was inspired by the original GiveCamp thrown by Toi Wright and Chris Koenig and the latest one hosted by John Hopkins and Jennifer Marsman. I was inspired by Joe O’Brien‘s passion for Ruby. I was inspired by more people than I can possibly name. I am the person that I am today because of the people that have inspired me through out my life.

At first, I couldn’t decide that I should profile anyone person because there are so many and I’d be doing a disservice to all those that I wasn’t profiling and I didn’t want to leave anyone out. Then I realized how stupid that was because I was leaving everyone out by not starting somewhere.

So, I decided to start with Nathan because he’s the most recent on my mind and has touched my life directly…

Who has inspired you and how?

When Nathan Blevins heard about the Ann Arbor GiveCamp he could have, like a lot of people, decide that it was too far away and not to come and left it alone. Instead, he decide to organize an offsite group and pulled in 4 more people to help. He hosted them at his house and they worked 9-5 each day. In the early going, he called and called, making sure that we hadn’t forgotten about him until we threw them a lot of work.

By doing so, he affected 2 different projects.

One was the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum (done in PHP so that it could fit in with the rest of their already existing web site). One of the guys, Dylan, that he hosted was a PHP savant and did a lot of the heavy lifting on that project. 

The second was a charity called Wonderpuzzle. It’s a charity run by my wife for children who have medical problems with no diagnosis. The parents of these children feel like their on an island because if their child’s condition had a name, they could join that community. As it is, they are bumping through the night with no one to turn to for help or even empathy as they fight against the insurance companies who won’t pay because they don’t have a name for some paper somewhere or the schools because the legislation only forces them to work with a small slice of named conditions like autism. Wonderpuzzle is an online community with discussion forums, articles and much more that address these issues.

I was very touched and privileged to get to demo the finished version of their site. Check it out:

What have they inspired you to do?

The next time that I look at something that’s the right thing to do but there are constraints in the way of my participation – I’m going to ideate on different ways to engage. I’m going to stop letting my “lame excuses” (all props to Michael Eaton for calling a number of people out on that) get in the way of my participation in a number of things that I’ve wanted to do.

Who else have they inspired?

The other people that came in to help Nathan out with the Knoxville GiveCamp satellite need mention too:

• Ben Farmer – Ben worked w/ Joe to make sure the site was completely ported over to sitefinity, replicated its functionality, and made sure the data was moved over as well.
  
• Jenny Farmer – Jenny was the mastermind behind the new design.  She spoke directly with Phoebe to make sure she got exactly what she wanted and made it so in photoshop. After that, she worked w/ me as Nathan made her ‘idea’ into HTML / .Net code. She, unfortunately, was not able to come in the second day due to not feeling well.
  
• Joe Simpson – Joe worked with Ben to make sure the site was completely ported over to sitefinity, replicated its functionality, and made sure the data was moved over as well.  Joe was actually a real trooper as he was usually the first one at Nathan’s house and the last to leave.
  
• Dylan Wolf – Dylan worked mainly on a separate PHP project.  However, any time he had down time he would jump on Wonderpuzzle and start taking small tasks on. He was a great asset to both projects and did an excellent job multitasking.

Call to Action

My challenge to you is to write an “Inspired By” post and profile another community hero.

In fact, I’m going to call out 5 people and because I want to know who inspires them. The fun part is that I could have started with any of these 5 people because they all inspire me.

Carry Payette (who did a very similar satellite group in Columbus)

Michael Eaton (who worked tirelessly at GiveCamp to make sure that everyone there had whatever they needed)

Martin Shoemaker (who brings design, best practices and humor everywhere he goes)

John Hopkins (who doesn’t want people to say thank you but rather – what can I do?)

Sam Henry (doesn’t blog much but when Sam sees a problem he goes after if head first. He, his wife and some of their friends, have started the Red Letters Campaign – Living Faith to End Poverty)

This past weekend was the Ann Arbor GiveCamp 2008. The idea is Geeks Giving Back. The GiveCamp organized a number of charities(15) and a number of developers (over a hundred signed up and 90ish showed – I don’t have exact numbers). We showed up on Friday night at 5:00 and started work. At 3:00 on Sunday afternoon, we showed what we had accomplished. In many cases, the charities just needed a web site or a better web site. In some cases, they needed real programming work done.

It was an amazing experience. I was involved in the first one in Dallas. I worked remote and contributed to the St. Vincent DePaul Society volunteer scheduling application with J Sawyer and Chris Koenig. I don’t remember how many charities and developers contributed to that one but it was a huge way to begin. Since then there was one in Kansas City and now Ann Arbor.

While at the event, I, like a ton of other people, wore many hats. I was assigned to a charity (Center Stage Drama – separate post on them coming at some point soon). I also was helping with some of the organization, running the break room for a couple of shifts, technical helper for many of the groups, photographer, videographer, errand boy and anything else that could be done.

One of my favorite things was that I tossed the ideas around of doing a short standup 2-4 times a day and I got to run those. It was fantastic to get all 80+ devs in a circle and be able to run through all of the groups and do a 1 minute status to find out how the project was going and what blocking issues where up. More than once we got a resolution or found the person that had the immediate answer to follow up right after the standup. On Sunday we did 3 quick standups about 2 hours apart. Those really helped everyone quickly find resolutions and gave everyone a sense that we were going to finish on time. All good stuff.

The last hat that I wore was a little surprising, even to me. On Friday night, we started chatting and realized that we have 5 remote developers down in Knoxville, TN headed up by Nathan Blevins. As I’m tying this – I’m realizing that I really need to just do a separate post for that group. Briefly, it was Ben Farmer, Dylan Wolf, Jenny Farmer, Joe Simpson, and Nathan Blevins. They did great work for several of our charities and even took on one completely. That’s my next post about Wonder Puzzle.

The only issue with GiveCamp is that we can’t realistically do it in a geography more than once a year because of the massive time commitment, organizational efforts and sleep depravation. I’ve got some more sustainable ideas floating around that I’ll surface when they’re a little more baked. Let me know if you want to be in on those early and we’ll start some conversations.

The reality here is that I can’t even come close to doing the whole experience justice. The best I can hope for is to inspire you to come next time…

*update* Carey Payette called me out – there were two satellite groups, Columbus, OH and Knoxville, TN. Sorry that I didn’t mention the Columbus crew in the original post. 

This has been a little while coming but one of our recently additions to the DPE Academic team is Devaris Brown.

Devaris is not only a passionate (and talented) developer, but he carries that passion over to all aspects of his life.

By day he’s an Evangelist, by night he’s DJ Fury aka the Furious One with a Sirius Satellite radio show on Friday and Saturday nights.  In fact, some might say his job is DJ first and Microsoftie second…

He was asked to DJ the events at the Imagine Cup in Paris. You can see a touch of that and some of how he’s using tech to make his shows rock on Channel 8 (The academic version of Channel 9). He even went on to explain he uses tools like PopFly to showcase what he’s played from certain nights right on his website or his myspace.

It’s easy to be proud of the team when we’ve got passionate and amazing guys like DJ Fury on board!

Imagine Cup 2008: DJ Fury… a Microsoftie?!? | Posts | Channel 8