Ben Scofield

It’s been a few days since we wrapped up Developer Day Austin, and I’m only now able to catch my breath – a few snowmageddon- and planning-related incidents combined to keep me pretty busy over the weekend and this week.

In a lot of ways, Austin reminded me of the very first Developer Day, back in March of last year. Some of the lessons in logisitics that we learned at that first event, in particular, were significantly reinforced by our experiences in Austin. Despite a few hiccups, however, the event as a whole went over well. I think we were able to bring together at least a few people who don’t often meet up – front-end developers and Rubyists, with a few Pythonists and others in the mix.

Our lineup of talks was front-end heavy this go-round, and that was interesting; I though Kyle Simpson and Alex Sexton did a great job bringing the JavaScript thunder, for instance, and I’m encourage to bring in more front-end talks at future events (especially because JavaScript is almost a lingua franca for web developers at this point). Unfortunately, I had to leave midway through the day (the aforementioned snowmageddon incident), so I missed Aaron Bedra, Eitan Suez, and Bruce Tate, each of whom I was excited to see.

And a few words about Austin… first, Austin is clearly Gowalla territory. Stepping off the plane, I was struck by how many featured spots there were, and it made bopping from place to place a lot of fun. Second, it was much colder than I expected. If I thought I underdressed for Boulder last year, it was nothing compared to the mismatch of expectations that Austin (and Dallas, on the way back) triggered.

Anyways, I think Austin provided a good start for the 2010 Developer Day season, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the series – speaking of which, the next event is February 27th in Durham, NC, so if you’re anywhere nearby register today!

Last weekend, I was out in Boulder, organizing and MCing for our last Developer Day of 2009. It was an exciting conference, bracketed by the first snow of the year for Boulder (and the first snow I’d ever seen in October), but luckily the vast majority of the attendees were able to make it safely into town – we only had one person (that I know of) turn back due to the road conditions.

Those who did make it in were treated to a great set of talks, including Chad Fowler’s keynote on creating a remarkable life, Derek Chen-Becker’s in-depth introduction to Scala, and Jeremy Hinegardner’s exploration of some tools that make it easier to work in a multi-language environment. Jeremy’s presentation in particular was interesting for me, since he discussed several of the databases prominent in the NoSQL movement – and in fact, I gave a lightning talk version of my comic domain modeling talk to add a little more color to the picture he drew.

All in all, this was probably the best Developer Day so far, and I’m very excited to start planning the 2010 series. Look for Developer Day in a city near you next year!

Developer Day has visited Durham, DC, and Boston so far…. Isn’t it about time we left the east coast and headed west?

Developer Day Boulder is coming on October 10th! We’re still in the process of finalizing details, but so far we’ve got Chad Fowler keynoting, David Eisinger speaking on using email as an interface for your application, and Rob Sanheim talking about building in the cloud – and if the past is any indication, the rest of the speakers (who’ll be announced over the next few weeks) will be fantastic developers and practitioners in a variety of languages, technologies, and domains.

Early bird registration lasts until September 25th, and is just $50 for a full day of great talks, food, a t-shirt, and some good old-fashioned community building. After that, the fee’ll jump to $75, and the shirt won’t be guaranteed, so if you’re anywhere in the Boulder-Denver area and free on the 10th, register today!

This past weekend was exciting, because it was the first instance of Developer Day held away from Viget’s and Relevance’s home territory – we took the show on the road up to Boston, with a lot of help from thoughtbot and the Microsoft NERD Center (which, incidentally, is an astounding space). It was both a lot of work and a lot of fun (at least for the half I was able to see; a minor emergency forced me to leave after lunch, so I missed the excellent afternoon talks), and I’m excited to continue taking Developer Day to places where smart people are doing good work.

I’ve posted a general recap over on Viget Extend, with comments from some of the attendees, so I’ll spend the remainder of this post recapping my talk: “Comics” Is Hard: Alternative Databases. I gave this talk at RubyNation a few months ago, and thanks to the feedback I got there, I was able to shift the focus a bit more towards what people wanted to see, with some great results (based on the SpeakerRate response). I’m very excited to see the talk continue to evolve, as I’ll be giving it again in Chicago in a little less than a month – and beyond that, hopefully it’ll inspire people to take a look (or another look) at alternatives to the traditional relational database model. There’s a ton of exciting work going on with key-value stores, document-oriented databases, and more, and I think they’re much more generally useful than the mainstream currently appreciates.

And with all that said, here are the slides!