I’ve finally uploaded a first batch of pictures from the StackOverflow DevDays in Boston. Out of over 350 pictures taken, only 20 made it to this cut, with several not-quite-as-good pictures that I may look at adding later. If you see any you’d like, let me know, and I’ll get a proper copy to you.

Taking photos at the event was very difficult. For human eyes, everything was fine, but for a camera’s lens, there was very little light. I didn’t use flash during the event; a common courtesy to both presenters and audience in an already low-light environment. It made me really wish that I had a 50mm f/1.4 lens like this one, though; too bad such wide aperture lenses are so expensive!

The other environmental difficulty for photography was all of the different light source types. There were fluorescent lights in the main area (blueish), recessed incandescent bulbs (redish-orange), and the projector light (near 6500K, or like-sunlight). So, in the picture at right, for example, the main subject, Joel Spolsky, was standing under incandescent lights. This gives him a redish-tinge. When correcting Joel’s white shirt back to white, the slides in the background, having a neutral tint before correction, end up tending toward blue after.

Regardless, I’m happy with the photos I did get. Again, feel free to check them out. Here’s the link in case you didn’t catch it earlier!

My StackOverflow DevDays Flickr Set

StackOverflow DevDays day in Boston was very fun, well planned, and well executed, with a nice array of speakers from across a wide swath of the development world.

The day started off with a keynote speech by Joel Spolsky. His talk was very amusing, and included a theory that all work boils down to a use case wherein the goal is to get the end-user laid, or is in furtherance of that end goal. He further went on to discuss the two objectives of simplicity and power, and that whereas they may seem diametrically opposed, there is money to be made in reconciling simplicity (Don’t make me decide on things I don’t care about) and power (I want to be able to do this and that and some from column C).

From there, the main scheduled presenters took over. Ned Batchelder¹ gave a good presentation on the Python programming language. Although I have been used to programming in Python for quite some time, I very much enjoyed the talk which used a Python spell checker as a demonstration of the features of the language. The talk moved at a good pace that was still interesting to me as someone who already knew the material, but also didn’t seem to leave anybody out in the code.

After Ned was Dan Pilone². Dan’s presentation focused on the iPhone development experience, and moved methodically through the most pertinent points, from XCode to Instruments and the Interface Builder, to the application submission process (denoted by slide showing a despairing man in a desert crying out as sand slips from his grasp), to the sales and marketing mentality necessary in Apple’s App Store. Humor tossed in at a few key places made this an enjoyable and solid overview, which is what it was. If you were looking for an in-depth look, then the one-hour format would leave you disappointed, but from outside iPhone development looking in, the presentation fit the time and audience well.

Just before lunch, Joel Spolsky³ retook the stage using 30 minutes to demo the latest version of FogBugz, FogBugz 7, the flagship product of his company, FogCreek. FogBugz includes a new feature in this version, which I’ll briefly mention called Kiln. Kiln is a new integrated and hosted source control⁴ and code review management service going into beta as of the announcement. If it piques your interest, you can check it out on FogCreek’s website.

After a lunch⁵ Patrick Hynds and Chris Bowen⁶ presented on ASP.NET MVC. Their talk was good, though there were points where it sounded like cheerleading rather than a technical talk. To be fair, Chris Bowen is a developer evangelist for Microsoft, so it’s not unexpected, and it could have just been the “view from my seat”. The subject matter was good; I walked away convinced that Microsoft had done quite well with their MVC implementation.

John Resig⁷ was the next presenter, and the creator of the jQuery JavaScript library. His talk focused around the need for testing in JavaScript. He focused on several different frameworks for testing, as well as different methodologies from in-browser unit testing to mocking out the entire browser with an out-of-browser solution like Env.JS, to behavioral testing and functional testing.

John did a good job impressing the difficulty of testing JavaScript in a manner that spans the majority of all browsers and indicated that, in his opinion, there’s nothing like real-world testing, with a real human. He pointed to Test Swarm as a distributed example of how to get in-browser testing across a wide array of user/browser configurations. Overall, a good spanning overview that didn’t get mired in the gritty details of each framework, but just enough to understand where each had its use.

The last presenter of the day was Miguel de Icaza⁸ presented on Mono. I spoke with him briefly at lunch, and even then, he was still vacillating as to the subject matter for his talk. The actual talk was mildly haphazard as a result, but the flow worked well with Miguel’s free personality. He took the audience through Mono Tools for Visual Studio, showing remote debugging from a Windows VS session to a program running on a remote SUSE Linux VM. From there, he went a step further, building an RPM of the ASP.NET MVC sample blog engine. Next, he uploaded that RPM to SUSE Studio and generated a VMWare image in ~10 minutes, fully configured, and was running the blog engine in Mono’s ASP.NET MVC.

Miguel also showcased MonoTouch, building a simple program in MonoDevelop on Mac OSX, and demonstrating it in the iPhone simulator. Including lots of pro-Linux banter and some pokes at Richard Stallman, Miguel kept the audience interested and amused, which is exactly what the last presentation in an 8-hour day needs.

On the whole, the StackOverflow DevDays conference was well done. I enjoyed myself even in those areas outside my expertise, and came away having learned something. Be prepared for a few advertisements for FogCreek during the breaks (well put together and enjoyable, but advertisements no less), but as the co-founder of StackOverflow is also a founder of FogCreek, it’s not un-expected. Was it worth my $99? I believe so. Do I recommend you go? If you have the time, and there’s a location near you, then yes; check out the list of scheduled speakers for your event and see if there are any you’d be interested in.

As I mentioned in my preview, I took many pictures of the event, but have not had a chance to process them yet. I hope to do so tonight and have something to post by this evening.

UPDATE: My first batch of pictures is now up. Check them out on my Flickr account and read my photographs article.

1. Ned’s DevDays blog post, including slides. On Twitter: @NedBat [↩]
2. On twitter: @danpilone [↩]
3. On Twitter: @Spolsky [↩]
4. The only hosted source control option is Mercurial; I didn’t get a chance to ask Joel why only Mercurial, though he assured us there were several reasons. [↩]
5. Provided lunches included turkey or beef sandwiches or a veggie wrap along with a half-ounce bag of chips, apple, and cookie [↩]
6. On Twitter: @ChrisBowen [↩]
7. On Twitter: @jresig [↩]
8. On Twitter: @migueldeicaza [↩]

Tomorrow, October 7, I’ll be headed to the StackOverflow DevDays in Boston. I’m especially excited to see Joel Spolsky and Miguel de Icaza.

I’ve been a fan of Joel’s insights, even if I don’t always agree. In my senior year of college, I received a copy of his book, The Best Software Writing I as an interview gift. In that book, Joel pulls together some great articles written by a very diverse group of people, all bringing their own insight to the world of software. When I began doing interviews from the “other side of the table”, I also found Smart and Gets Things Done to be a great read. Joel will be presenting on his company’s primary product FogBugz.

At the end of the day, Miguel will be presenting on something to do with Mono. Because Mono is such a “giant universe”, Miguel has solicited feedback as to which Mono topic should be the focus. I’m interested to hear about MonoTouch¹ and Mono.Simd. There are a lot of value-added ways in which Mono differentiates itself, yet compliments, the .NET framework from Microsoft; I’m looking forward to hearing about the future of these and more developments.

Other topics to be presented include Python, the iPhone, ASP.NET MVC, and JavaScript testing. Although it’s late, if you feel inclined, tickets can still be obtained for the event ($99 each), and registration is at 0800. WiFi is also being provided free of charge, so I’ll probably post an update during the event.

I’ll be bringing along my camera to take some photos, which I’ll be posting on Flickr after the event². If you see me around, feel free to introduce yourself or pose for a picture.

UPDATE: My first batch of pictures is now up. Check them out on my Flickr account and read my photographs article.

1. Think the Mono/.NET framework and C# brought to the iPhone and iPod Touch. [↩]
2. Right now, you’ll only see a picture of Lucy, my cat, from when she was a kitten. [↩]