A search for meaning in the noise.
I picked up Seven Languages in Seven Weeks after Martin Fowler recommended it. After half an hour of reading I wrote one whole Ruby program!
i = rand(10)
puts "I'm thinking of a number x ∈ [0,9]. Can you guess it?"
while true do
print ">> "
guess = gets.to_i
break if guess == i
puts "Too low." if guess < i
puts "Too high." if guess > i
end
puts "Good job :-)"
(I may have known a little bit of Ruby before I started ;-).
While I was in Vegas for MIX, I used my phone's built-in wifi tethering rather than pay the hotel $15/day for shitty wifi. Surprised by how good it was, I posted something to that effect on Facebook:
Once I got back home, my internet was being difficult so I decided to conduct an experiment:
Can you guess which one's my wired internet connection? That's right: The slow one. So yeah, this is obviously not okay and I'm going to have to do some digging.
Today was the last day of the conference. There were sessions.
The title to this talk was a little misleading as I was kind of expecting a talk about server-side performance, but it turned out to be pretty much exclusively about client-side performance. So yeah, Y-Slow and Page Speed are both great tools and you should use them, but I already knew that.
Oh yeah and if you're interested, you should read Steve Souders' book.
One comment, the guy doing the talk did a lot of packing/minification/etc. dynamically with HttpHandlers. Don't do that. Do it in your build step.
Given that Mono is kind of important to the stuff I get paid to work on at the moment, it seemed like a good idea to go see Miguel's talk.
Right now he seems to be pretty focused on iOS/Android tables/phones and he talked about:
It was good to find out what Miguel was focusing on. It was less good to find out he was focusing on things completely unrelated to the way we're using Mono.
I think "Farming for Ideas" was the best talk with a message along the lines of "You can cultivate ideas by realizing that ideas beget ideas and letting them happen." Kind of along the lines of "Sketching is great because you can prototype lots of things without overcommitting to the first idea you bump into in a bar."
This was the second talk of the day about stuff I already knew of. There's this guy called Douglas Crockford. He wrote a book. You should read it. He wrote a tool. You should use it. He did some videos. You should watch them.
Want a little more than that? I will assert that JavaScript is actually a pretty damn good language and that you actually have to learn it rather than trying to hobble along implementing C#/Java/whatever idioms. Crockford's work has a whole bunch of arguments to back up that assertion, so I won't.
I totally bailed as there wasn't anything wort attending in the final slot.
Today was the second day of the conference: Keynotes, sessions and the attendee party.
Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and Kinect were the topics of today's keynote. As far as WP7 goes, there was talk of the NoDo update, WP7 getting IE 9 and the upcoming "mango" update. Ars Technica has a good write up. One thing to note, they couldn't resist pitting an iPhone and a Nexus S against some dev WP7 phone in the speed reading demo. You know the deal: blah blah blah contrived, blah blah blah childish, blah blah blah we'll see if anybody cares when it ships. At least they didn't dwell on it the way they did with IE9 benchmarks yesterday.
... and then some guys came out and talked about Silverlight and Kinect and I didn't care (but at least no one talked about SharePoint). Oh yeah, and we got free Kinects. Yay, I guess.
It was great to see Crockford talk given that he has had a such profound impact on the way that I, personally, write JS as well as having a huge impact on the evolution of the language (he's on the ECMAScript committee). He talked about the approach the committee took to ECMAScript:
He also made some interesting offhand remarks:
Knockout.js is a JavaScript library for binding data models to UI elements. It looks kind of cool.
The title kind of gives away that this was a complete snoozefest, but the slot really sucked and there wasn't anything interesting to go to.
Script# is a library/complier that lets you write your JavaScript in C#. "Why do you want to write your JavaScript in C#?" you might ask. I don't know... this feels like yet another attempt to fix JavaScript by someone that doesn't get that JavaScript is actually a pretty good language.
Phil demoed Entity Framework code-first, Razor, scaffolding and NuGet. Suspiciously similar to Hanselman's demo from yesterday, but maybe a little deeper. Razor is definitely cool, but see my comments from yesterday a long the lines of "Yeah that's cool, but tell me again why I'm not just using django/Rails?"