This hackathon was about messing around with a fixed set of open APIs and come up with a good app. We got together into teams and TED + Red Gate put the WiFi, the space, the food and the beer (which I had to miss).

I’m reasonably happy with our outcome, because for the time given you can’t really expect much more. Only finding out what was available in those APIs and agree between 7 people what to do took us 40% of the time. Once we knew what to do, the coding fun began.

What we came up with was a very simple way of putting in perspective what very little it takes to help developing countries. Or what could’ve been done with the staggering amounts of money companies in developed countries raise. For example, Spinvox’s first round of funding could’ve funded over 100,000 health related businesses in Sierra Leone through Kiva. Awesome.

Couple of guys putting together a Ruby backend for the API (including caching requests, as most APIs are limited to a certain amount of request per IP), couple of guys putting together HTML + Ajax to read the data and pass it to Flash and I did a little Flash widget to display the data. Fairly simple, but we got it working.

[UPDATE] We won : ) Ventropy is up and running! [/UPDATE]

Interesting to see what other people did. We were very, very pragmatic. Thought about using SVN or GIT, but settled for using Dropbox and worked really well. We got something working as soon as we could and added small improvements till the deadline. Should we take the project to the real life, I very much doubt we would keep anything we coded, though. Other people went for a complete setup (source control, a website, DB abstraction) and I think that time could’ve been better used in something else, but I’m not part of the jury : )

The day was totally worth it, but to me it felt like a sprint more than a marathon. 3 years ago, Yahoo’s Hackday in London was a full weekend of coding. Much more time to code, learn, develop ideas and network. Sure, the time pressure was a funny incentive, but i like more the “what can you do in 48hrs?” thing. Still, thanks to the organizers and the sponsors.

Sadly I had to leave just after the last presentation and to top it up I’m also going to miss the main TEDXCam conference next weekend. Why would I miss such an event, specially when we got free tickets for participating in the Hackathon?

Well, next weekend is the Xtreme Geek Weekend – Barcelona Edition.

Stay tuned!

So, yesterday went to StackOverflow DevDays in London. I’ll start with the bad part:

Organization: Massive queues to pick up food or coffee. FAIL. No 10 minutes break between speakers. FAIL. Mics failing. FAIL. The chairs EPIC FAIL.

The content: I understand that FogCreek is putting some money to sponsor the events but Joel run 2 completely sales focused sessions, one about FogBugz, the other one about FogCreek. Didn’t enjoy either. Please remember that this is not a free conference. Fair enough, it’s not pricey either (£85) and I’m not sure if they cover expenses with tickets only, but it just felt too much advertising. I’m not alone, read the twits. BTW, I wonder if they got similar feeback in the US.

That’s it for the bad part, now the good part.

Joel: when not doing a sales pitch, he is very funny and a great speaker. The intro video with Jeff was a lot of fun.

Jeff: the same. It was like a live Coding Horror post, always very inspiring.

Now the GREAT part:

Jon Skeet: really funny, probably the best speaker and that I didn’t see coming. Put in perspective that Jon Skeet is the SO user with highest reputation and such a badass that he has earned his own facts, much like Chuck Norris! I would love to see him again, FOTB next year? People loved him. He talked about the absolutely mess that is working with dates, strings and numbers in computers due to so many different standards. All this with a sock puppet in his right hand.

Things like Argentina decided this year NOT to follow daylight savings and warned the world only 11 days before hand. Well done you guys!

Christian Heilmann: another very good speaker. He’s a Yahoo! evangelist and I can see why. He demoed YQL and I I had a question banging in my head all the time: Why nobody told me about this before?!?!?! It’s a Yahoo! service to mashup open APIs and it looks REALLY powerful and something I’d definitely look into. Not sure for what yet, but looked very, very cool.

Pekka Kosonen: He works for Nokia and gave a talk about Qt (since when Qt has been pronounced “cute“?!?!?!) that, for those who don’t know, is the framework Nokia finally bought not long ago for building cross-platform *native* applications (including phones and all major desktop OSs). Well he was VERY honest about Nokia. I mean, very, very honest saying things like “we used to suck a lot, now we are getting our act together“. He was very funny, the sort of speaker that doesn’t laugh his own jokes, even when they are good. The honesty was very refreshing after the sales-oriented talks. Again, I wonder what would a US company do should an employee speak *the truth* that about them. Wonder what Joel was thinking (something along the lines “I would SO fire this guy as soon as he’s off the stage“).

Some pearls to put in t-shirts:

Joel: “The mother of all options is giving the user a compiler”
Jeff: “Don’t be afraid of failing publicly ”
Pekka Kosonen: “Light at the end of the tunnel, this time hopefully not a train”
Pekka Kosonen: ” I wrote a Java book but was only for the money”
Phil Nash: “Objective C is like Marmite: LOVE it or HATE it” *
J Mark Pimp about Obj-C: “80s called, they want their memory manager back” // <-- HILARIOUS

There were other speakes as well, they did a decent job. There was a nice intro to iPhone development, a nice intro to Android development, a nice intro to jQuery, a rather dry talk about compilers and a rather drier talk abut Python. Not bad for a single day.

Would I come back next year? I'll have to think about it.

* For probably anyone outside of the UK: Marmite is a cream that literally people either love or hate, they even say it in their adds. Me? Haven’t tried it!

This year’s FOTB will be remembered as “yes, the year that Joa Ebert…” FOTB. His session was without a doubt the best of the 3 days and if you feel bad for not going, imagine the people that did go to FOTB but didn’t go to the session.

Because it’s taken me a week to write this post (went to Spain after FOTB, came back yesterday, waking up today at 6am wasn’t funny), I’m not going to talk much about every single thing that went on like Richard Lord and frameworks, Mike Jones and Flex 4, Colin Moock doesn’t read books when he gets into new things (funny!), AIR 2.0 improvements, etc. and will only talk about this:

++ Joa Ebert

His session was on Tuesday 22nd September, let’s see how long does it take Adobe to put his optimizations into the nightly builds of the Flex SDK compiler. Because fair enough if your compiler can be improved, but there will be NO EXCUSE to not use Joa’s code. Luckily for us, it seems Adobe is taking it the good way.

The bright side of things is that, without refactoring any code, current applications can improve performance just by running his optimizations. Or from another angle: the AVM2 is faster than we all thought. Can’t wait to hear from all the people squeezing the ass of the player: Papervision and all the 3D engines to begin with, but also image encoders/decoders and other CPU intensive tasks.

++ Open Source rocks

I was very, very happy to see how almost all the big names were finishing their presentations saying: “… and yeah, all these amazing things I do you can download already from this URL…“.

Specially remarkable was Joel Gethin Lewis that said, and I quote:

I think that selling software is immoral

How cool :)

If you are of those who think that he’s a communist and his approach is taking Open Source too far, then at least check out this other quote:

All my work is released as Open Source and I don’t give a shit about people ripping it. I’ve done it, had fun with it and made my money already. I’m not interested any more in the things I’ve done, go and get them. I’m interested in the next thing I’m going to build.

Awesome mindset. And he’s not kidding, here’s his repo.

We are not talking about a nerd in his apartment, we are talking about very successful people working for very big companies. They know their work would be 10x harder without the gazillion OS libraries out there and they think it’s only fair to contribute back as payment. So do I. Let alone the practical point of view of getting other people “to work for you”. Ask Carlos Ulloa what Papervision was before releasing it. It was re-written and ported to AS3 in the first 3 months. And you cannot do that alone. Neither PPV nor Carlos would be anywhere near successful as they are now if Carlos would have kept it for himself only.

Open Frameworks, Merapi, Apparat, ASAXB (do NOT miss out the TV ad)… So if you think your code is so valuable that has to be kept locked, think again. Unless you are doing cooler things than these guys your code is not worth keeping closed (and probably not even then). And yes, I know that telling clients that you are going to release their sources sounds like utopia, we had a long chat about that, but I’ll leave that discussion for another post.

–

And that’s it. For me it’s been the best FOTB so far, if only for the people there! Cay, Diego, Diego, Carlos, the rest of the UsTwo crew and some of the guys of the haXe list made the 4 days very geeky and fun.

Already waiting for FOTB 2010 : )

So it was a no-brainer following them to StackOverflow when they released it, and it was also a no-brainer picking up a ticket for the StackOverflow DevDays when they announced it.

The fun thing is that I got my ticket for London and a week later they announced they are coming to Cambridge as well. Now I’m not sure if I should stick to my London ticket or try to exchange it for one to Cambridge. It came up on our local Refresh mailing list and I think this is interesting:

I thought about that and went for Cambridge. London is going to be 800 people I think. It’s going to be a big event, not too dissimilar to FOWA I would wager when it’s been in Kensington. Cambridge is going to be much smaller, which means it should be more personal.

… and lacking the exciting London startups/people.

True, but in amongst 800 people it’s harder to meet them. I’ve nearly always found (and been guilty of) meeting up with people I know at such massive events

So, what do you prefer, big or small conferences?

It turns out the guys at Subflash just announced this year’s location, no more and no less than sunny Alicante during the last weekend of August. Although I’ve only been to Subflash once I remember it as one of the coolest Flash conferences that I’ve ever been to. Specially because it’s small enough so you get to know and talk to everybody. It’s around 50 Flash geeks together during 3 days, everybody goes for lunch at the same time, to the same pub at the same time, to the beach at the same time… It’s a family conference : )

Plus, Marcos is always such a nice host taking very good care of everybody, another reason of Subflash’ success all these years.

Sadly I won’t be able to make it this time, I’m going to FOTB not long afterwards plus I already had big plans for that weekend, but if you have no plans go and treat yourself to the real Flash on the beach, you won’t regret it.

I remember trying FDT’s Linux version back then and I have to say I wasn’t very pleased. I don’t know what it was, maybe the JRE version I was running, maybe FDT itself, but it wasn’t working properly. Let alone it runs on top of my old nemesis Eclipse. So yesterday I grabbed one of the FDT guys (the marketing one) and asked how the Linux version was doing these days. “We don’t officially support Linux”. Rather disappointing for a *commercial* application ¬¬

But I have to admit that the workflow looks veeeeeeeery cool. It seems the tool tries to help you out without getting in your way. You know, like those tools that pretend to more clever than you are *cof,Word,cof,cof*. For example, the live error highlighting feature saves you a lot of time. Also you can move around FDT views and dialogs using the keyboard only, and that’s usually a good usability sign.

On a side note again I was amazed by the HUGE difference of skills across the Flash community. While there are people successfully doing actual work with a very low let’s say… regard for Software Development best practices, there’re also pure hardcore programmers following those best practices to heart. And all of them are using pretty much the same tools. Kudos to Adobe for creating such a flexible platform. I say this because the guys at PowerFlasher seem to be using Parsley, a framework for Flex and Flash that I had never heard from before and that it seems very interesting.

There’s no LFPUG meeting next month and it seems we might have a little bit of haXe for January, which would be very cool. Damn I need a new version of HippoHX for then!