kuniform

I almost titled this post “Dazed and confused” since I definitely am that, too, after so many sessions, ideas, new friends, and experiences in such a short period of time. Wow. It started for me with fever baths and few hours of sleep every night, and ended with fun, new friendships, and lots of learning. Now, on the other side of it, I realize just how much I got religion at it. ‘nuff said, there.

Wednesday night, the plan was to put Sophia to bed and then work on the presentation that night and the next day. She had a fever of 102.5. It’s always tough to tell in the summer, especially with how much she likes being outside. I gave her fever reliever, waited with her for awhile, it seemed to have broken. At 2 am, she awoke with a 105.3 fever. By 4:30, it was back down to 102 thanks to sponge baths, ibuprofen, etc. At 8 am, 12 hours after I first noticed the fever, she was up, and the fever, was, too, to 104. We skipped the fever reliever a few times because it’s tough on little livers, but we followed this cycle through all of Thursday.

Lora was in Sacramento on business. Getting to the conference to register was a bit of a struggle. Once there, I dashed out before I had time to figure out where the speaker reception was, frenetic about making sure Sophia was ok and nailing down the presentation. Lora’s parents took care of her on Friday, but she still had a high fever, and I ducked out on Why The Lucky Stiff. Finally, Saturday morning she was back to normal. At that point, I had 150% of a presentation, lots of hours spent capturing and listening to a variety of screen readers and still no answer definitive answer on how to address AJAX + Accessibility on Rails.

Quick hits: David Thomas’ talk was wide ranging and full of a ton of great suggestions, but DHH didn’t seem to buy the need to increase the size of Rails. Seems like the Rails team are keeping the core tight and using plug-ins where needed. They’d know far better than me, but it sounds wise.

I don’t think Martin Fowler said “uh” once between words or even paused much. It was just all smooth, well-measured and insightful. I paid particularly close attention, given my interest in patterns. He did nothing to betray the impression I had of him from his work, that he is brilliant.

Paul Graham’s keynote was on the power of existing on the margins and what people on the margins can create. He’s a great presenter. A measure of greatness in any human endeavor is when you know it’s coming and you still can’t resist it. Graham’s speech was intended to fire up the audience, and it sure did, lights out. It never seemed contrived or staged, though it most certainly was.

Having spent the past three years reading peer-reviewed papers, Stefan Kaes’ presentation on Rails Performance Metrics hit a sweet spot with me as he put up detailed statistical analysis of different aspects of Rails performance. Matthew Biddulph’s talk on the Rails work he did for the BBC was phenomenal. Justin Gehtland’s demo of their new app and the techniques they used to produce it was really impressive. It’s going to be released as Streamlined, and will be very cool. They are looking for help theming the work, and I nearly volunteered.

DHH’s talk emphasizing CRUD cast the scales from my eyes, there. Active Resource looks like it will be incredible. The Rails Core session was great, too. There were many other good presentations, I believe the audience felt that way about mine. I’ll be posting it here shortly. I learned many things from my presentation and the conference in general.

Here are several:

• I missed a whiteboard. It’s a habit from teaching.


• I really missed business cards. I’ve been a student and a staffer at Orbitz for so long I’ve really forgotten about carrying them. The Rails community is so tight-knit, I felt like I wanted to give everyone a card, and get one from everyone.


• I tried to stay away from XHTML/CSS code examples, assuming everyone knew these techniques like the back of their hand. I was so wrong, and the presentation so much less valuable because of this. More on this later.


• Not only should you repeat the question, but you should also clarify the heck out of it. When Jeremy Seitz asked a question about Flash and streaming voice, I couldn’t for the life of me get how you would do that. When he explained that the voice files were mp3s generated on the server and streamed through flash, it made a ton more sense. I believe I could have answered that question. Email me, Jeremy, if you read this.


• Rails developers are about as interested in SGML and JavaScript as Java developers are. That is to say, not much, though there is a subset that is very aware. I guess it’s like any group. They’d probably wish I knew more Ruby, but I can recite elements of the DOM like they’re my kids.


• I think I was one of the few presenters aside from Martin Fowler or Paul Graham that is not working in Rails fulltime. Comparing me to them is like racing a paper cup floating in the harbor against speedboats, when it comes to OOP, hacking, etc. I could probably beat them in naming usability evaluation methods or the construction of classroom test, at which point he would probably program a robot in LISP to mock me.


• I’ve never been in a community as kind, and as hivey. I felt a consummate outsider coming in, and left feeling the opposite. I think that was a feeling shared by many there.

Day 1, I met Robert Bousquet of collectiveX, Matt Pelletier of EastMedia, Zed Shaw of Mongrel, Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Brainspl.at and Obie Fernandez of ThoughtWorks. By the time I met him in the afternoon, I was a pile of over-caffeinated cells dreaming of becoming inert pudding. In a tiny corner of my brain that was still awake, I was loving every minute of it. CollectiveX is a really sharp concept in groupware. Really sweet. Matt’s presentation on Sunday morning was on OpenID and is definitely something I intend to track, as the architecture seems really viable. Way smarter than Passport.

Day 2, I was following Ezra’s presentation and bummed a smoke off him for afterwards, I was that nervous and distracted. Most of the talks I’d attended were in areas I was weakest, like migrations and testing. Ezra’s was on deployment. How would people take to accessibility, usability and personas?

I’d finalized it about an hour beforehand, and had been up Friday night way too late nailing down the details not touched on Thursday. I felt it went well. I had a few folks walk out and a few walk in, and enough questions to fill the session. Good times.
After my presentation, I got to meet Peter of standards-schmandards (and Fangs for Firefox) and Valtech, Andreas of Valtech, Jeremy Seitz of somebox, and Jeremy Sydik of the University of Nebraska. Peter has released Fangs for Firefox. It’s so useful for accessibility. I ate dinner with them and some friends of Jeremy Seitz’s. Good times at, of all places, a Chili’s. Ugh, Rosemont. A guy from the conference was at the bar, I recognized him from the far left side of the room when I was presenting. He yelled, “Hey, great presentation!” I bought him a margarita.

Sunday, I caught Marcel by himself and said hi again. He remembered my whole deal from months ago, from a five minute conversation. Did Fowler and Graham program him? Seriously, a very nice guy. It’s one of the things that has struck me about each of the 37signals guys I’ve met. Each of them has far less ego than a middle managers at most enterprise firms. It’s uncanny. Sam was equally cool, even though I tagged him about accessibility coming out of the bathroom. It’s a full circle for me, in the bathroom with software rockstars, though I let him wash his hands, and made sure to wash mine, too.

The biggest thing Mr. Stephenson said, is “education.” He suggested I blog about it, and he would subscribe to my feed. Sam, that humbles me, but I will defer to Jim Thatcher or Peter’s standards-schmandards, above. If you can stomach all three, bless you. You may also receive doses of comics, environment, and government accountability. It’ll be fun.
Okay, it’s getting late and this is becoming a book. I’d had talks with Jeremy Sydik about accessibility and scaffolding. Dave Thomas in his keynote mentioned how much the scaffolding looks primitive is web 1.0. I talked to Marcel Molina and Sam Stephenson about how to get involved in helping make Rails more accessible. They both had some good ideas, but DHH in the open session had one to grow on. Somebody (maybe Jeremy?) asked a question about accessibilty and scaffolding. Sam repeated, “education.” David immediately corrected him, “Education through patches.”

I’m not promising anything yet, because my skills may be too meager to commit a patch. I am intrigued enough to do some scouting into what it would take to do the work, and how the scaffold could be improved.
Finally, many thanks to Chad Fowler, David Clark and the rest for a wonderful conference.