thoughts.on.code

My talks for OSCON 2006, and the Central Iowa NoFluffJustStuff conference are all up on my Presentations page. Go check them out!

I am starting the recovery process from 7 days of conference. I first talked at NFJS in Des Moines, IA over last weekend. Five minutes after my presentation I was on a shuttle to the airport to make my flight to Portland! And then it was 5 days of OSCON. It was awesome to go to such a large conference and meet so many people! It was especially cool to get to give a presentation to this great crowd.

I also had a lot of fun going to FOSCON II while I was out in Portland. FOSCON is a Rubyist gathering one evening during the conference, put on by the PDX.rb group. This was probably the most interesting single thing I saw, as FOSCON was held at FreeGeek, a local FOSS community center of sorts, which was PACKED. I took the pub crawl route with a number of others, and by the time we got there the pizza was demolished. Even so, it was great, and some really cool talks were given.

It less than 3 days now until the start of the Central Iowa Software Symposium NoFluffJustStuff conference in Des Moines, and just 6 days until OSCON. I am unbelievably excited to be presenting at both of these awesome conferences.

I have not started packing, which is something I traditionally put off until 2AM the night before I leave… I once started packing for a month-long trip to South Africa at 1AM before a 6:30AM flight. This time I will “Be Prepared”. My presentations are all set, and now I just need to keep the content flowing in my head (pretty easy thing to do when there is already so much open space ).

If you are going to be at either of these conferences, drop me a line and we can meet up for a drink.

Somehow I completely spaced on posting this. On Sunday, Amanda and I ran in our first-ever 5K race. My time was 35:34, which is my best time so far. It would have been much faster if it wasn’t so HOT out… over 90 degrees, with humidity just about as high. The heat sucked the life out of me, and I ended up walking for a little over a mile of the course.

We were running for the Angel Guardians non-profit:

The mission of Angel Guardians, Inc. is to help put the puzzle pieces of life together for teenagers and adults with cognitive and developmental disabilities. While many opportunities and programs exist for children with special needs, there is a void as the children reach maturity. Angel Guardians, Inc. was created to enrich the lives of these individuals through adulthood.

Pretty cool stuff.

I am so proud of Amanda. She hates running, but she stuck with her training program and completed the race with a time of 36:31.

Overall I am satisfied with both of our times (given the heat), and am really looking forward to running in another 5k. I will probably wait until fall to race again, and in the meantime only run in the early mornings like I have been… the heat is just too much.

Last night I was finishing up my slides for the No Fluff Central Iowa Software Symposium, and remembered Blaine mentioning that Code Complete 2 had some good advice re: Performance.

So, I went to local B&N and had a look. I had read the first Code Complete back in College, and man what a great book that was.

Well, from what I read last night Code Complete 2 is even better. I could only focus on the Performance + Tuning chapters last night, but they are a perfect example of pragmatism. McConnell shows so much sense that I bet some people just will not believe that his approaches could possibly work. You know, things like not worrying about performance until the code works… silly stuff like that.

One of the great things was that he showed more code, and it was updated to be msotly Java, with some C. As I skimmed through the rest of the book, I saw one example where he was showing how comments and poorly constructed code can have a compoundingly bad effect. The method created the trivially simple fibonacci sequence, but did it in such a way that it was impossible to tell without running the code in my head.

Code Complete, along with The Pragmatic Programmer and the new Practices of an Agile Developer are my three favorite books of all time. If you have not had a chance to read any of them yet, you need to.

Last night I finished Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer. This is the first book I’ve read specifically focused on Ajax technologies, and it does a really good job. I particularly liked how they prove early on in the book (2nd chapter) that Google Maps was created by mere mortals, and not some Gods/Rocket Scientists/Alien species, by actually implementing it right there in the book!

I am not a very experienced Javascript developer, and so a great benefit (for me) was that code was all very clear and easy to read… they took things step by step and made sense of the situation before pushing on.

They at least touch on most of the big frameworks out there right now: Prototype, Dojo, Script.aculo.us, Rico, MochiKit (very breifly), Atlas, and DWR. As you can see with the last two frameworks they also talk about integration with a variety of server-side web development environments: PHP, Spring with DWR, ASP.Net with Atlas, and of course Ruby on Rails with Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

Some other things discussed:

• Review of JavaScript
• UI Usability / Effective Ajax
• Degradable Ajax
• Tools (debuggers, logging, etc)
• Future of Ajax

I particularly liked the usability and degradable Ajax sections… extremely sensible recommendations.

Overall this book is a great introduction to Ajax for the novice Javascript developer, and a good refresher/overview of Ajax for the more experienced Javascript developer. There are also some chapters that I would like to give to managers as an introduction to what this “Ajax thing” is.