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Latest podcast up

I had a good conversation with Joe Fiorini about balancing his daily work in .NET with a passion and enthusiasm for Ruby on Rails.  Have a listen.


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Latest podcast up – Codemash Open Spaces – Open Source in .NET

I had a fun time recording this ‘open spaces’ meeting at Codemash last week.  This was led by Joe Brinkman from the DotNetNuke project, and joining us was Kevin Devine from the Euclid Public Library, Sara Ford from Codeplex @ Microsoft, Steven Harman from the Subtext project and – shoot – I do not have the contact info for the other gentleman who is on the talk. Oh wait – yes I do – Jay Wren!   The sound was *decent*, although there was a shortage of mics.  I also accidentally dropped Joe’s volume on a few occasions, but overall it felt like a great chat, so here it is.

Topics include the pros and cons of getting Contributor License Agreements in place on an open source project, building community, a bit of good natured back and forth on Microsoft’s role in all this, interesting comparisons to the Java community, and more.

BTW, this is just a sample of many of the informal chats that happen for 2 days @ codemash.  If you like these types of discussions, join us next year!

The podcast is up at http://www.webdevradio.com


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Concurrecy is hard

Brian Goetz is keynoting at codemash on the topic of concurrency.  I’ve intuitively known that concurrency and threading is hard.  I come from mostly a PHP world, and butted heads with some Java devs a few years ago because I built something in PHP that they were building in Java.  “But PHP doesn’t have threads!” was their rationale (stated) for not using my app.  Yet there’s a world-renown expert standing up here outlining how difficult threading is, and outlining all the worms in the can that gets opened by employing threading.

Granted, my ‘solution’ was to push the concurrent issues to transactions in the database, which isn’t really ‘solving’ the issue entirely.  I do think that it does simplify things to some extent, but it’s more a gut feeling that anything based on empirical evidence.  Perhaps Brian will talk about this solution and whether it’s really any ‘better’ or not.

The Ousterhoust presentation  on threading would have been a great thing to know about years ago.


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Latest webdevradio podcast up – Codemash Bull Session

I had a chance to have a fun discussion with Dave Kroondyk, Adam Lumsden and Elizabeth Naramore about web development, ecommerce, project management, content management systems, shark dissection, PHP, Mozilla’s Weave project, general MIchigan awesomeness and some other topics. I was a bit closer to the mike than I should have been, but worse things have happened. Enjoy the eternal optimism of youth distilled in to 45 minutes of listening pleasure. Visit http://www.webdevradio.com to listen in…


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Tagging evolved

I was having an interesting conversation with Joe Brinkman from the DotNetNuke project this evening, and he got to talking about the ‘social networking’ focus in the next DNN release.  I had a small brainwave and suggested something to him, but the implications might be larger than I originally considered.

He mentioned that they’d be looking at providing the capability to ‘tag’ every piece of content in the system, instead of just a few item types which can be tagged currently in DNN.  Their focus will be on the business/enterprise aspect of tagging and the social features in DNN, and given this I suggested that the tags have timestamps associated with them.  When doing a search through tags (which itself often isn’t done – it’s just a blind SQL SELECT triggered from a REST URL), giving tags with older dates less weight in the final results will likely make sense.  You could even implement a cutoff.  If a document was tagged ‘vacationpolicy’ 6 years ago, it’s very likely it’s not the vacation policy you’re looking for today.

I realize that tagging isn’t the only way to categorize data, but it’s another piece of data which will need to be considered when searching.  Using that extra metadata about the tag should be a factor in search results.  Storing ‘who’ tagged something would also be useful for influencing search results, as my ‘friends’ (people in my department, or people with my interests, or whatever) who tag something as ‘foo’ should result in things they tagged as ‘foo’ being rated higher than items tagged ‘foo’ by people I don’t know, or actively dislike for some reason.

I have to imagine that sites like Flickr, which have built a huge collection of tag data, have much of this tag meta information on hand, and could easily use it to influence results.  Introducing new behaviour on public sites for something which is already expected behaviour might not on the cards anytime soon, but I have to imagine these sorts of filters and weighting structures will make their way in to tag search algorithms (if such things even exist right now – I bet they don’t yet).

What do you think?


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Neal Ford keynote @ codemash

I’m not going to write a whole lot about this, but Neal Ford’s main takeaway point was that the future of programming is dynamically typed languages running on virtual machines – things like JRuby running on the JVM or IronPython on .NET.  I’m putting those examples in his mouth, so to speak – he didn’t use those specific examples, but that’s what I took away.  Dynamic languages are big for Neal, working at Thoughtworks, a big Ruby shop.  I’ve mostly been in the ‘dynamic language’ world anyway, so it doesn’t seem like that big of a shift to me.  Moving from PHP in to Groovy is sort of a no brainer, in a way, because the dynamic goodness is still there, but you get some of the ecosystem benefits of the Java world.

One other quote (he was quoting someone else) is that in 10 years (was it 10 years?), compiling a program will just be seen as a weak form of unit testing.  Interesting thought, though perhaps it’s a bit too far?  I dunno.

Any thoughts from any of you on the future of the programming?


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Driving to codemash

again this year.  Leaving this afternoon.  It’s about a 9 hour drive, and I think I miscalculated a bit this year.  I was comparing flying to driving.  I’d initially estimated fuel cost at around $100.  I think it’s going to be more like $190 or so.  Flying would have been $240, but then there’s a car rental and some extra fuel for a few days, so it would’ve been more like $350 probably, but it’s not as much of a slam dunk decision as I thought it would be at first.  Oh well.  Depends on what car I take tho too.  I want to take my Sebring, which gets ~30mpg.  My wife wants me to take her PT Cruiser, which only gets around 25mpg,  ($190 estimate based on PT).  So I can save 20% on fuel by taking the Sebring, but that means convincing my wife – not an easy task all the time.

Side note: she’s sick as well (got my cold last week) but WILL NOT go to the doctor’s office.  How do you force a spouse to do something for their own good???


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Codemash free admission drawing giveaway

The codemash organizers have graciously donated a free pass to the upcoming Codemash conference to be given away to one lucky webdevradio.com listener.  To enter in to the drawing, listen to the codemash episode interview podcast on webdevradio with Jim Holmes, follow the instructions, and hope your name is drawn.


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Interview with Joe Brinkman of DotNetNuke

I put up an interview with Joe Brinkman of the DotNetNuke project over at http://www.webdevradio.com. Grahame helped me clean up the audio (well, did some detective work really). About 15 seconds in to the interview (after I’d already done a sanity sound check) a distinct hum came in to the audio, and was sort of hard to remove without affecting the sound some. Grahame determined it was between 390 and 490 hz, so I pulled those out as much as possible. That’s also a range which affects the voices, so we sound a little tinny, but I think it works.

I met Joe at the CodeMash conference a little over a week ago. He had quite a lot to say about the project, its goals, how the project has evolved, future plans and challenges, and a host of other interesting info. If this conversation doesn’t pique your interest in DotNetNuke, I’m not sure what would. :)


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Codemash quick review

I’m posting a quick wrap up of the codemash conference I attended last week. This is mostly because I’ll forget things if I don’t, but also to let anyone reading know what they missed and they should look to attend next year.

The pros:

There was an enormous amount of talent in that one main ballroom. I think the final number was somewhere around 500 people attended, which seemed a perfect size for the venue. Frankly, it was just about a perfect size, period. I can’t imagine a conference being much larger and being able to be as effective, at least not in solely a two day period.

The session topics were fairly diverse, with talks touching on most of the major issues facing software developers of almost any persuasion. I’m not sure I saw any talks devoted specifically to perl or coldfusion, but there were talks focusing on .net, java, ruby, python, php, flex, as well as project management, individual programmer productivity, testing and QA, networking, and a few others which are already escaping my brain.

The cons:

I already mentioned to Jim Holmes (one of the organizers) that perhaps a third day wouldn’t have gone amiss. The drawback to having so much accumulated experience in one conference is that there was no easy way to decide which sessions to attend. Each session time block had 4, and sometimes 5, options to choose from. Adding an extra day and dropping the choices to 3 per time block would have reduced the ‘I couldn’t attend both sessions’ situation I found myself in (as did others I spoke with).

From a tech standpoint, the conference was a bit heavy on .NET sessions. Talking with Jim Holmes further, he said that the primary organizers are firstly .NET-oriented, and that there was some time constraints reaching out to other communities quickly. Given the org time, I’d say they did a good job, but would also say there’s room for some improvement next year in a few more sessions which aren’t specifically .NET-oriented.

This isn’t to say that I mind learning about .NET stuff – it’s comparatively the new kid on the block – but I had to balance. Dianne Marsh (was it Dianne?) challenged people to attend sessions outside their comfort zone. If you’re a .NET person, attend a Java session, etc. However, I had to balance that approach with hitting sessions which would do me some practical good in the day to day developer work I do, which meant php/scripting/java/testing/qa sessions.

Recordings – I recorded a few sessions on my own (just audio), but I do think that having dedicated recording facilities in each room, even if organized on a volunteer basis – would also be very invaluable. I would be willing to help organize that aspect of things at the next conference. Perhaps an audio disc or video DVD of *all* sessions could be sold. Discounted price if you attended, and a higher price for non-attendees. I think I would have easily spent $29 to get a set of DVDs with MPEG footage of all the sessions. $30 * 500 people would be $15000, which would likely cover the recording expenses, or come close anyway. $40 would make it $20000, which I think is what Jim said one of the recording quotes was. It might even be worth it to build in to the ticket price next year.

Open spaces concept. I missed the opening evening session, so I didn’t hear all the intro to this. However, while the idea is interesting, I didn’t hear enough promoting of the idea during the rest of the conference. Especially if this goes to three days next year (fingers crossed) I’d like to have seen more emphasis placed on the open spaces idea. Perhaps if there were more than 500 people, it would have grown more organically?

I’ve blogged ‘live’ notes from some of the sessions, and what I attended was worth the price of admission, no question. I think it was a fantastic conference by any stretch, and all the more so considering it was a first effort by this group. I’m definitely looking forward to attending next year, and to continue to keep up with some new and interesting people I met there.


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