Tag: conferences

Clojure Conj 2013

Clojure Conj 2013 venue small 2Last week I attended Clojure Conj, the annual “main” event for the Clojure development community. Past events were held in Durham, NC at a typical conference hotel; this year’s event was held in Alexandria VA, in the much more impressive venue shown here – I happened to look out my hotel room window at just the right moment, as you can see.

(I should mention of course, that Oasis Digital was a sponsor.)

As is often the case that software related conferences, it is not so much about the learning (which you can achieve as well or better on the Internet) as about the community. Some of my current attention is on ClojureScript; I’ve been interacting with the group of people on its mailing list, but last week I have the opportunity to chat with several them in person.

Here is an overall impression. Most of the content was very worthwhile. Many of the talks were at a relatively sophisticated technical level, which is very good for the audience at this event, mostly populated by people who are already in the Clojure world.

A few of the talks, which I will not identify out of politeness, were not so hot in terms of the value received versus the hour spent watching. My hope is that as the community grows and matures, there will be a greater supply of speakers who are more skilled at reliably delivering value in the time allotted – It would be great to raise that evaluation from “most of the talks were worth the time” to “all of the talks were worth the time”.

A few more specific notes:

data.fressian

Fressian is near to my heart because my previous company (which sold a Java Web Start SaaS application) used Hessian, after which Fressian is modeled and named. Hessian served us very well, and we were able to adjust its source code a bit too match a specific local need to traverse some object references and not others.

Prismatic Schema

Prismatic Schema is a very appealing piece of technology, which will quite likely make it into my projects.

Clojure Conj 2013 venue small 3

Harmonikit

I get the impression that Rich Hickey can spend a relatively small number of hours and come up with yet another fascinator chunk of technology. Perhaps “on-demand”. Or even without any demand, just sitting in a hammock.

The most visually appealing part of the project was an off-the-shelf $50 product for building audio control GUIs on iPads. A talk about how to make things like (in Clojure, if at Clojure Conj) hat might be even more interesting than this talk which merely used it.

Programming with Hand Tools

Tim Ewald is an outstanding speaker. His talk about hand tools was a delight, partly because I spend many hours as a teen working on projects in wood, with a combination of hand tools and power tools. But I came away with a somewhat different impression than Tim did about the relative merits of power tools versus hand tools. This is probably an indication of my lack of skill, but I was always much happier with the results I could get with a power tool. A carefully used power tool could produce a bit of work perfectly straight, perfectly cut, etc. the first time. I remember in a required (!) shop class at school (do they even have those anymore?) cutting a dado with a hand saw and chisel. Neither my cut, nor any other, not the teacher’s, was anywhere near the ideal easily obtained with a table saw and dado blade.

Still, that didn’t take away from the enjoyment of Tim’s talk at all. I think this is a talk people will mention at every future Clojure Conj to come.

 

October 2010: Business of Software, Strange Loop, Clojure Conj

I attended three conferences in October 2010, the most of any month of my life to date. Others have posted extensively about all three events, so I’ll link to a few posts and point out highlights for me.

Business of Software 2010

BoS alternates between San Franscisco and Boston; this year it was in Boston. There are plenty of excellent summaries online (here, here, here, here), and an especially nice set of photos here.

The conference was packed full of great speakers, mostly well known. I am sure the most “expensive” person in the lineup was Seth Godin; he is an excellent speaker and had interesting content, but wasn’t as relevant to me as some of the others.

The high point of BoS was Joel Spolsky’s closing talk. Unlike everyone else, he used no slides, and simply sat at a table to tell us the story of his last year or so. I was a bit surprised at his public airing of partner grievances, but that was probably necessary to tell the (very worthwhile) story of his transition over the last year from the “small, profitable company” model to the “go big” model. The former can make good money; but only the latter can make a broad impact to build a (perhaps slightly) better world.

I also especially enjoyed Erik Sink and Derek Sivers telling the stories of their company sales. My own company sale experience was more like Erik Sink’s.

In the past, Business of Software has posted the videos for year N during the marketing runup for year N+1; I suspect the same will happen this time. When those videos appear, watch them. Especially keep an eye out for Joel’s criticism of Craigslist, with which I agree.

Strange Loop 2010

Strange Loop is held in, and named after, the Delmar Loop area which spans University City and a bit of St. Louis. The 2010 event was much larger than the 2009 event; I don’t know whether it will be possile to accomodate 2011’s crowd in the Loop area or not; I’ll certainly attend either way.

Again there are plenty of summaries online, including here and here.

The highlight of this event for me was Guy Steele’s talk on parallelism. Unlike some commenters, I greatly enjoyed both the first half of the talk (a stroll through some ancient IBM assembly code) and the second half (including the Fortress example code). I’ve been inspired by this talk and criticism about it to put together my own upcoming code-centric talks, in which I’ll touch on the key parallelism ideas briefly, then step through several code examples in various languages.

I also spoke at Strange Loop, in a 20 minute slot, on Lua (video). Most of the feedback on my talk was positive, particularly of the “why, not how” approach I used to make the best use of 20 minutes. A few people would have preferred a longer talk with more “how”; I might put together such a presentation at a later date.

Disclosure: Oasis Digital sponsored Strange Loop.

(first clojure-conj)

At Clojure Conj I had the strong impression of being at the start of something big. I believe that Clojure, in spite of the needlessly-feared parentheses, has more “legs” than any other of the current crop of ascendant languages: getting state right (and thus making it possible to get parallelism right) is more important than syntax. Based on the folks I met at the Conj, I’d say Clojure has exactly the right early adopters on board.

As usual plenty of others have posted detailed notes (here, here, here, here, here).

The talk that stands out most to me was not exactly about Clojure. Rich Hickey’s keynote was about the importance and process of thinking deeply about problems to create a solution. In a sense this is the counterpoint to agile, rapid-iteration development, suitable to a different class of problems. Clojure exudes a sense of having been thought about in depth, and Rich is obviously the #1 deep thinker. When this arrives on video, watch it. Twice.

I also enjoyed Rich’s impromptu Go clinic at the pre-conference speaker (and sponsor) dinner. Note that Go has totally different rules from the similarly named Go-Moku, and is not to be confused with Google’s Go language.

Disclosure: Oasis Digital sponsored Clojure Conj.

Back to Work

I’ve had very little time for my own projects this month; between the events, most of my available hours were occupied with Oasis Digital customers. My mind is bursting with worthwhile ideas to pursue.

Lua Doesn’t Suck – Strange Loop 2010 video

At Strange Loop 2010, I gave a 20 minute talk on Lua. The talk briefly covered six reasons (why, not how) to choose Lua for embedded scripting. Lua is safe, fast, simple, easily learned, and more popular that you might expect.

The Strange Loop crew only recorded video in the two largest venues (out of six), so I made a “bootleg” video of my talk, for your viewing pleasure:

video
play-sharp-fill

The video/audio sync starts out OK, but drifts off by a second or so by the end. The drift is minor, so it is reasonably viewable all the way through. If you don’t have Flash installed (and thus don’t see the video above), you can download the video (x264); it plays well on most platforms (including an iPad).

The slides are available for PDF download.

Video Hackery

This video recording was an experiment: instead of hiring a video crew (with professional equipment), or using my DV camcorder, I instead used the video recording capability of my family’s consumer-grade Canon digicam. This device has three advantages over my DV camcorder:

  1. No tape machinery; no motors; thus no motor noise in the audio.
  2. Smaller size, easier to carry in and out.
  3. Directly produces a video file, easily copied off its SD card.

As you can see from the results, the video quality is adequate but not great. Still, I learned that if I want to increase the quality of recording, the first step is not to use a better camera or lens! Rather, it is to bring (or persuade the venue to provide) better light. For good video results, the key is light the speaker well, without shining any extra light on the projector screen. With that in place, a better camera make sense.

The audio was a different story. Like nearly all consumer video cameras (and digicams with video), mine doesn’t have an external audio input, so the audio (from ~12 feet away) was awful. As a backup I had used a $75 audio recorder and a $30 lapel microphone, and that audio is very good, certainly worth using instead of the video recording audio track.

To combine the video in file A with the audio in file B, I used the ffmpeg invocation below. I reached the time adjustments below in just a few iterations of trial and error, by watching the drafts in VLC, using “f” and “g” to experiment with the audio/video time sync. I also trimmed off a bit of the bottom of the video, and used “mp4creator.exe -optimize”, which I had handy on a Windows machine, to prepare the file for progressive download viewing.

ffmpeg -y -ss 34.0 -i WS_10001.WMA -ss 34.0 -itsoffset -12.05 -i MVI_4285.AVI -shortest -t 8000 -vcodec libx264 -vpre normal -cropbottom 120 -b 400k -threads 2 -async 200 Cordes-2010-StrangeLoop-Lua.m4v

The remaining bits of technology are FlowPlayer, a WordPress FlowPlayer plugin, and a CDN.

Upcoming Talk: How to SaaS, Revisited

Back in 2007 I gave a talk on Selling your Software as a Service. The room was quite small but tightly packed, and several people have asked since then if I plan to repeat it. (I went back and listened to the recording of that talk, on the linked page; it holds up quite well. I recommend it if you interested in the topic!)

I finally have the right opportunity to do so; later this month at the St. Louis Innovation Camp mini-conference I’ll give an updated talk on the same topic, on Friday, Feb 26, in a time-slot to-be-determined. The talk:

The Software as a Service Business Model

In this talk, I will share some “lessons learned” from five years operating a Software as a Service business. Topics will include:

  • What is SaaS?
  • Starting a SaaS business
  • SaaS Product Management
  • Cash Flow
  • Customer Retention
  • Infrastructure and Operations

Business of Software 2009: Excellent

I just returned from the Business of Software 2009 conference, and can summarize it as excellent. Here are some thoughts on specific bits of it, mostly interesting to people who were there.

  • Geoffrey Moore’s opening talk was an early highlight of the conference; I’ve often been disappointed when a well-known person from somewhat outside a conference’s focus is invited to talk, but it turned out that Geoff had ample highly relevant content. Most notably, his 9-point recommendation for small software firms is dead on.
  • It is highly likely that my next project will be in one of the 20-something categories that Paul Graham thinks will grow. I’m not sure if this is saying much, though, because his points were so numerous and broad.
  • Mat Clayton had strong points about A/B testing, but I felt a bit dirty merely being in the room for his list of “dirty tactics” for social networking promotion. I heard similar feedback from other attendees.
  • Don Norman’s talk was excellent, but would have been more excellent if it was a bit shorter and thus tighter.
  • My favorite talk of the conference was Ryan Carson’s. In conversations about his talk, I heard the idea of several directions that the essence of Ryan’s message was to trade off, to give up profits in order to do various good things instead. I strongly suspect, though, that Ryan is doing the best he can, i.e. the strategy he proclaims is also how he maximizes profits (for a company like his).
  • Paul Kenny talked about telling stories. You must do this. I can’t explain just how important this talk was, so I won’t.
  • Pecha Kucha was this conference’s name for lightning talks. As elsewhere, these talks are usually very dense and very good, because the format forces the speaker to discard all the slow parts, all the boring parts, all the exposition, and instead go directly for their key points. It works.
  • I noticed a large number of people using TweetDeck, and adopted it myself. It is a higher-mental-bandwidth way to consume Twitter and Facebook data streams, and is well suited to the a sane Twitter usage pattern of one short intense sessions per day.

I have only a few criticisms:

  • A few of the speakers went long. Though it would annoy the speaker, it would be much better for the conference if all sessions were promptly stopped on time.
  • Luke Hohmann’s talk on “Innovation Games” felt like a sales pitch for his company, even though he tried hard to talk mostly in general terms.
  • The schedule was a bit too dense. We needed more slack between / before / after, to discuss and absorb the information.
  • It would have been nice to have a talk address the business of custom software development.
  • The swag, in the form of a slanket / snuggie, is much too physically large for an event attended mostly via air travel. Of course I could have discarded it (and some attendees did), this would have felt like waste. I would have preferred if Neil had simply scrapped it and kept that money as profit.