ETE 2009 - Twittering Reflections

I just got back from ETE 2009 in Philadelphia, and it was really a great conference. Andy Hunt the Pragmatic Programmer was one of the keynote speakers, as was the CTO behind the Obama on-line presence for the campaign.

I learned a lot, but something that really stood out wasn't what was in the presentations, it was what was going on between the audience. It was Twitter.

I have heard about people using Twitter at SXSW for meet-ups, or at large conferences to talk about the speaker while they were speaking, but I had not personally seen it before.

Frankly it was amazing, and I think part of that was that the organizers specifically suggested using the tag #phillyete in all of their posts. Prior to the conference there were a couple posts, but nothing worth mentioning. On the first day of the conference it all exploded.

I was reading about people stuck in traffic, getting on the plane, and otherwise in transit to the conference. I heard about spontaneous attendee created meet-ups, and who met who. I even read about who lost at the Guitar Hero competition (me).

During the talks if you watched Twitter you could see what people were saying about the speaker. Usually it was good stuff, but a few times you could see that the session wasn't what they thought it would be.

Even though the conference is over I still see chatter. Seems there is an after-conference meet-up tonight. Maybe I can make it.

One RIA Framework to Rule Them All

I took some time on this holiday break to start experimenting with Silverlight and Flex, neither of which I have any experience with. While I was toying around with them I started thinking about the dizzying number of the RIA framework options.

With Silverlight I really liked developing in Visual Studio, it was intuitive and fast. I also liked that fact that I could use XAML to markup the layout, then back it up with C# for the event handling.

Flex looks good too. I especially like the fact that you can mark up your presentation in an XML format (MXML), similar to XAML. I am not a fan of ActionScript though, but I will have to see how east the IDE makes editing the code when I get that far.

Then there is GWT. Well, I liked that so much that I wrote a book about it. I like the fact that I can used my editor of choice (Eclipse), code in Java, and it is open and free.

I once used Ext-JS on a large project, and although it looked great it was extremely painful. When I got done the code was completely unmaintainable.

I have also dealt with Scriptaculous, Prototype, DWR, and other tools over the years, but for smaller projects that probably can't be considered RIAs.

Then there is Wicket, Echo2, blah, blah, blah... so many to choose from!

So which is best? I am partial to GWT, mostly because I know it the best, and it is free and has a great community. On the other hand, I could get used to Silverlight (although the cost can be prohibitive).

If you have an opinion I would like to hear it.

Resistance to Change

As a programmer I have learned to embrace change, but this was not always the case. I can remember when I was once told a long time ago that I was resistant to change. At the time I felt that change was bad, it was expensive and there was in my mind no reason do so. But now I see the flip side of the coin, without change there can not be betterment.

For me changing from a Perl developer to a Java developer was a good thing. Changing from a pure development role to an architect role was also a good thing. I have found that if you want to change it can be extremely rewarding and even fun. For me I enjoy learning and employing new tools that increase my productivity and the quality of my applications, but with others I often see resistance to these changes.

Now that I am a father I see something in my son that wasn't obvious to me when I was his age. I see that he wants to learn. He wants to play with the computer, learn how to count, and he learns things because to him it is all a big game. Learning for him is fun.

To me it seems that there is some force in him that makes him want to explore and learn, and this isn't unique to just my son, all children seem to exhibit this behaviour. This makes me wonder what it is that makes us adults begin to resist change at some point in our lives, and we no longer see the fun in it.

I am not a psychiatrist, so I dare not try to explain this phenomena, but there is a reason why I am bringing this up (bear with me). I have been thinking about the tools that I have begun to employ in the work environment, and wanted to start blogging about them. All of them were resisted by at least some of our developers, but over time they began to see the benefits and now that the change had taken hold it is no longer difficult.

Some of the tools that I now live by are JUnit, Jira, Crucible, Fisheye, Subversion, and others. Some of these are free and some are not. When I blog about them I expect to see some resistance, especially for the commercial tools. In light of the expected resistance I will try to spell out how they made things better for both the developer who needs to use them and the manager who needs to understand the value proposition.

Reminiscing the GWT Conference

As some of you may know, I had the privilege of speaking at the GWT conference hosted by Pearson Education this past week. I was part of the GWT tools panel moderated by Adam Houghton, creator of GWTFlow. The rest of the panel included Eric Clayberg of Instantiations, Ray Cromwell CTO of Timepedia, and Fred Sauer creator of the gwt-dnd library. Being part of the tools panel was great, but I think that with most conferences, the really fun part were the discussions between talks.

Some of the more notable characters there were David Geary and Billy Hoffman. David is a veteran author, with his last book being one on GWT (of course I would still recommend GWT in Action!). It was great talking with David, and his presentation was really well done. His experience shows, and he knows how to entertain a crowd. Outside of his duties he was pretty easy to spot, he was the only one wearing shorts.

Billy Hoffman, a hacker, security researcher, and recently author, gave a talk on Ajax Security. He is extremely passionate about his work, and it really showed in his presentation. He covered a ton of material, and could have covered a ton more if given more time for his presentation. In talking with Billy, he had indicated that Ajax is very scary from a security standpoint. This is partially because the code examples that you find in developer documentation are riddled with security problems. His book was the only one I picked up during the conference, and although I just started reading it, it looks like it will provide me with a lot of useful knowledge.

Some of the others there were Bruce Johnson, Ryan Dewsbury, Rob Jellinghaus, Joel Webber, Scott Blum, and the list goes on and on and on. The best art is that none of them were there to push their books, promote Google, or push their products. Instead it was about furthering GWT, finding out how GWT has solved real world problems, and providing information to those new to GWT. Each night of the conference we would hold a free-form session to discuss ideas and talk about GWT.

In between sessions I was able to talk with a lot of interesting people and see some of their GWT work. And now that I have seen some of these real products using GWT I am completely blown away with what can be accomplished with GWT. For at least a couple of them, using GWT to build their project was their second or third try at getting it to work. It was both enlightening and encouraging.

So, without going on and on, let me say a few things. First, it was fantastic to finally meet in person those who I had only known over email. Second, it was great to meet all of you who had read my book or used the GWT-WL, and had nice things to say about it. I don't do this sort of stuff for money, so it was very encouraging and makes me want to do more. Third, we need to do it again soon! The conference was fantastic and we need to do this more often. And if you didn't make it to this one I hope to meet you at the next one.

Tail Chasing

I hope that I am not the only one with this problem, but I often find myself trying too many different things. By "things" I of course mean technologies. Things like Wicket, Grails, jQuery, and Silverlight. So many cool things to learn, and only so many hours in the day. It is enough to make my head spin.

I have been trying to come up with a strategy that will allow me to learn more, but with little success. I toyed with the idea of quitting my job to maximize my learning time, but my wife reminded me that we still need to pay the bills. With that plan scrapped I thought that maybe I could get rid of my wife, thus reducing the bills that need to get paid. That wasn't a great idea either for various reasons, including the fact that I can't take care of myself.

So what's a tech junkie to do?

This has led to some deep thinking about the state of our craft. After some thought I have summarized it as "Tail Chasing". Let me see if I can explain.

Let's say that you are a developer, and you have been spending the past year or so really getting to know a given technology. Now you are being told that the technology you are using is inferior to this "other" technology. You take a look and realize that it might be best to switch. A year later you finally have a good understanding of the tool, and use it with great skill. Then someone tells you about this "other" technology.

How many of us built our own MVC frameworks only to move to Struts, then maybe on to Spring MVC. Sure, there are some improvements made in each technological step, but since you are spending most of your time really getting to know a product you often spend little time getting the most out of it. This is compounded by the fact that you often use several of these products at the same time, adding to what you need to learn.

So what is a dog to do? Although you are moving forward, you never quite catch the tail. Should you just stop moving forward, or run faster or slower?