OSCON 2007

I've been so busy lately I haven't had much time to blog. There are a lot of posts coming through soon but the most important and time sensitive is a post about OSCON 2007.

Windmill

My talk on windmill (http://windmill.osafoundation.org) was accepted for OSCON 2007, titled Windmill: Automated Testing of your AJAX web Applications.

Although only my name is on the presentation as a speaker Adam Christian accompanied me through the presentation and demos and it would have been a pretty bad talk if he wasn't there. The talk went really smoothly and was very well received. I don't know if it was that the subject of web testing is in demand, or just a result of having "AJAX" in the presentation title but the room was packed, they brought in more chairs and eventually had to stop letting people in once the room was at it's limit (they were really strict about this at OSCON, i imagine it's due to fire codes at the conference center).

Behind the scenes the windmill talk was a bit different. I attended a wedding up in Bellingham, WA shortly before the conference and Adam didn't get in to Portland until Wednesday morning. Our talk was on Thursday morning and we still didn't have some of the features finished that were in our slides, the end-user documentation on windmill's trac wiki was horribly outdated, and we hadn't even started to record the screencasts for our demo. We got a bit of work in by leaving the conference a little early on Wednesday (after seeing some pretty bad presentations) but then we went over to the Mozilla party, and from there we went to the Sun party. I think we ended up back in the hotel around 12:30, and cranked out most of the feature and docs work. Then we woke up early to finish up the screencasts. When we walked to the conference center Adam had to hold his laptop open to finish the video rendering for the demo. Once we got to the conference room everything went smoothly and we had a great talk, we even got some complements on how well we handled the dual speaker presentation format (apparently some of the other talks with more than one speaker didn't go very smoothly).

We didn't have very many questions during our Q&A session, but over the next two days we spent hours answering questions from people who were at the talk. I think it's hard for a lot of people to ask questions in that kind of public setting. We were interviewed for WebDevRadio, a podcast by Michael Kismal on Friday, hopefully that interview will be up soon.

OSAF @ OSCON

Katie did a lightning talk on the Chandler eco-system and the upcoming release. Unfortunately the time conflicted with the time for our windmill talk so I wasn't able to see it.

I did see Ted Leung and Mimi Yin's talk on the Open Design process. It was very interesting and I'm really curious to see how the process evolves after Preview.

Other talks

I attended Testing and Debugging the Web Tier, The Holistic Programmer, and Open Source Hardware. I would have attended more but between our talk and fielding questions about OSAF, Chandler and Windmill it was hard to get around.

Didn't learn anything new during "Testing and Debugging the Web Tier", it was mostly an overview of firebug, js shells, httpunit and Selenium. It was done by one of the guys at ThoughtWorks, he was suppose to also give a talk on Selenium on Friday which Adam and I were excited to see because we were hoping to see some new features but the talk was abruptly canceled.

The Holistic Programmer was interesting. The way I learned computing started at the lowest level and worked up. The first language I learned was Assembly, then C, then Perl, then a variety of other languages (now I stay almost exclusively in python). The talk was about how understanding the layers above and beneath you give you a greater understanding of your environment and contribute to your ability to write less bug prone and better performing code. It was all stuff I agreed with but explained in a way I'd never be able to do. I think I may have been in the minority for some of the talk tho, I remember looking around the room and thinking "Am I REALLY the only person who cares about compiler theory in the audience". But it seemed to go over well enough.

The Open Source Hardware talk was the best one I went to by far. It was so good it made me realize how much i missed out not being in the other hardware talks over the course of the conference. I'm totally buying a chumby and building a wireless jammer some day when I have time to play again :)

A few quick notes

Ted Leung is the best person in the world to roll around a conference with, the man knows everyone.

Myself and someone from metaweb who's name escapes me contributed to bcm buckling down and buying an iPhone once he returned to SF.

Adam spent most of the weekend swearing at his HTC windows mobile phone. He bought an iPhone this last Thursday after a little more time after OSCON breaking down mentally and submitting to apple :)

We met a few people from a New Zealand company named SilverStripe. One of the founders, Sam Minnee is really excited about windmill and has been logging bugs, writing docs, and putting in some really smart enhancement requests on windmill's trac. He came down to SF after OSCON and I was able to catch up with him for a drink the day before I had to fly out to Rochester, NY.