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!

So, after some difficulties getting the planes to fly on time, I finally made it home from CodeMash late last night. Despite only being there for a short time (and being intensely jealous of everyone who was able to stay for the full event), I had a great time.

I did notice a couple of differences between CodeMash and the Ruby/open source conferences I normally attend, however. First, the gender balance was, while still skewed, was much closer than I’m used to. I remember hearing somewhere that there were more women in enterprise computing (.Net and Java) than in the more fringe technologies, and I guess I’ve got anecdotal evidence to back that up, now.

Also, the sponsorship atmosphere was very different – in fact, it felt more like the Startup Crawl than it did the Expo Hall at RailsConf. Sponsor booths had video games, coding problems, and a ton of giveaways (both raffles and freebies), and their staff were a bit more assertive.

My talk (an updated version of the one I gave at RubyConf) went over well, I think – no ratings on SpeakerRate yet, but (like all technical conferences) there were substantial problems with the wifi, so I’m hoping that people will rate it once they return home. I did fail in one significant way, however: I didn’t consider my audience as carefully as I should have. The needs of an audience of .Net, Java, and related technologists are somewhat different than those of a room full of Rubyists. I got a question on Neo4j’s licensing, for instance, that hasn’t come up in any of the half-dozen or more times I’ve talked about it previously.

I don’t think that this problem affected the presentation itself, but it’s certainly something I should have done for the question period.

I’ve given my “Comics” Is Hard talk about five times now, and the feedback consistently fell into one of two buckets:

• Some people wanted to see more of the domain modeling part, either because they still weren’t convinced that comics, etc., are hard to model relationally, or they enjoyed seeing me get riled up.
• Other people wanted to see more of the alternative database part. Generally, these people already knew that some domains were hard to model, or they had other needs that were pushing them towards a NoSQL solution and they wanted more background and examples.

Given that feedback, I finally bit the bullet and split the talk into two, each of which will hopefully please one audience. RubyConf was the first time I’ve given either of these, and I’m thinking that NoSQL: Death to Relational Databases(?) was a success.

First, the slides:

I think the slides from this talk are more capable of standing alone than many of my more recent decks, so I won’t go into much detail here. Basically, I spoke about five reasons people are looking at NoSQL solutions now, described four major families (key-value stores, column- and document-oriented databases, and graph databases), showed how those families generally stack up for the aforementioned reasons, and gave a quick example of how to use one or two systems from each family (e.g., Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB, Neo4J), all before wrapping up by describing several scenarios that might demand hybrid solutions.

I tried a couple of different things in this talk. I’ve looked at integrating the backchannel before (taking questions over Twitter, etc.), but with the conference wifi in a pretty bad state that wasn’t possible. I’ve also been thinking about ways to keep the backchannel going after the talk itself, which Twitter, IRC, and the like can’t handle. To that end, I’ve set up a Google Wave for the talk – if you’d like to join in the discussion, try this link (if it doesn’t work, you can search on ‘with:public NoSQL Death to Relational Databases’ and it should pop up).

I also decided to provide a few explicit next steps for the audience. Much too often, speakers leave their goals – what they want the audience to do as a result of their talk – implicit, expecting the audience to pick it up by osmosis and be instantly motivated to do it. Unfortunately, that never really happens, so I went ahead and stated my goals outright.

I got some great face-to-face feedback after the talk, and I was very happy with how it went. SpeakerRate hasn’t been as uniformly positive, however, and I’m afraid that the wifi situation prevented a number of people who attended from rating and/or leaving a comment – at the moment, I’ve only got nine ratings, when the room was mostly full. All in all, though, I’m encouraged by the talk, and I’m looking forward to giving it again (updated, of course) at CodeMash in January.

In case you didn’t notice, the CFP for RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore went out yesterday – and along with it, the news that I’m co-chairing the conference with Chad Fowler. I’m very excited to be a part of the team this year, and I’m really looking forward to helping shape the conference.

If you’ve got ideas for how RailsConf could be the very best it can be, I’m all ears! Feel free to leave a comment here, or email me.

We’re rapidly approaching November, which means that another NaNoWriMo is almost upon us. NaNo’s provided that last little push for tens of thousands of novelists over the past ten years. Given its success, I’m very excited to see that some people are experimenting with the format, and are trying to bring some of that inspiration to other disciplines.

The most recent issue of the Pragmatic Programmers‘ magazine contains one of those experiments: PragProWriMo. Instead of 200k words of a novel, participants in PragProWriMo are asked to commit to writing 80 pages of a technical book. The scope’s a little smaller than NaNo, but it’s still a significant challenge for people willing to undertake it – and it could possibly result in some exciting new technical books down the road.

There’s also been a bit of chatter on Twitter about something like a NaOSSWriMo – starting and releasing a substantial open source project in November. I’m really excited that people might undertake this challenge, as we’ve seen what talented individuals can do in two days before… what more could someone accomplish with thirty days of intense effort on a single project?

So, if you’ve got the time in November, why don’t you rise to the challenge of one of these projects? Or, if you’ve got something else in mind, start posting about it now, since you never know who else might get excited by it and join you for the month.