StackOverflow #devdays Recap

Yesterday Malachi (my flat mate) No wait, actually: On Tuesday evening, Malachi and myself headed to Newcastle at about 11pm to catch a night bus to London. Why would we put ourselves through this torture?! (It really was that bad – we figured the coach would be empty and we could spread out, unfortunately this was not the case and two six foot+ guys had to cramp/try and sleep on a coach…) For StackOverflow DevDays London of course!

If you don’t know what StackOverflow is, shame on you: it’s a programmers question and answer site also a developer careers centre (?) as well as a blog, (excellent) podcast and belongs to part of a wider community of self-help sites (“The Trilogy”).

The idea of the site/trilogy is a brainchild of Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror fame) and Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software).

DevDays is a series of 1 Day conferences held mostly around the USA with a couple of stops in the UK and Europe. The day was really a chance for the StackOverflow community to get together and to hear a series of intro talks on a number of new(ish) technologies and a chance for the sponsors/technological evangelists (?) to share their “messages” with developers.

Back to the story… So at 6.20AM myself and Malachi arrived into Victoria Coach Station (this is where I wish I’d thought ahead and taken photos throughout the day to better illustrate this..) pretty [expletive] tired, groggy, stiff etc.   We made our way round to Kensington High Street and grabbed large coffees from Neros and borrowed their bathroom facilities for teeth brushing and general freshening up!

The event was run by Carsonified (a company based in my “hometown” of Bath actually) and was generally pretty smooth, especially considering there were 800 odd attendees (making London by far the largest of the events). Though there were a few quibbles, the “waiting” (and/or networking) area was far too small and the projector didn’t seem very bright or completely in focus, I had a great day.

The keynote was by Joel himself and was about the whole simplicity vs. complexity argument or the 37 Signals vs. Microsoft argument. He actually came to what seemed like a very reasonable conclusion: that elegance is the answer. Your software probably should be capable of doing everything the customer wants, it’s just that it should do it elegantly without the average user having to wade through a million and one check boxes and preference menus.

The first tech talk was by Michael Sparks from the Beeb R&D Labs going over an “elegant” piece of Python code that was a fully fledged spellchecker in an unbelievably small number of lines of code. It was pretty interesting and flew through some of the features of Python. It was hard to get a lot out of as it was so fast but it did make me wish Perl had a standard REPL ‘cos they just look like a fun way of playing with a language!

After that Joel did a demo of FogBugz and Kiln, which both looked impressively slick and fortunately being a student, who also happens to be project managing younger students – I get free access! Plus, part of the schwag we grabbed included a book on project management with FogBugz – Sweet Deal! I was looking at the #devdays twitter stream and a few people were grumbling about the “advertisement” but I thought it was fair game as the conference was so cheap.

Next was an Android talk but that seemed pretty uninspiring to be frank, the guy was half demoing code but it was just a bit of a mess ‘cos no one far off could read so he zoomed in and blaahaha.. it was too boring to write about: basically he didn’t live demo and instead showed screenshots of “what would have happened” which I thought was a bit lame – plus they didn’t give us free GPhones – haha!

Remy Sharp then did the most interesting and solid (’til that point) talk of the day all about jQuery. It was slick, I like jQuery and it was cool seeing how to turn your code into a reusable plugin – I had no idea how to do that until then. A lot of people seemed to think it was too basic but I don’t think he could have assumed that half the people already used jQuery a lot and if you do want to know more in depth he mentioned the jQuery conference coming to London soon.

At some point (not quite sure the order) was lunch – we skipped the queues and grabbed pancakes down the road… Apparently they ran out of food and the coffee was terrible. I’m more of a tea man but the coffee seemed okay to me? Poor show that they didn’t have enough food though.

Then there was a talk by Jeff Atwood which was very cool – kinda feel I know him and Joel just by the sheer number of podcasts I’ve listened to. It was inspiring: basically the take away was learn to write and communicate clearly because that is the most important skill developers require (and also read that new book of coding interviews!).

Next up was a talk about Qt (Cute not Cutey – I think). I believe that Qt is a wrapper for C++ which takes your code and makes it executable on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows CE and Symbian. I thought Pekka Kosonen was a good speaker, pretty amusing to listen to (although I was struggling to understand some of the Finish-accented English). Qt itself doesn’t interest me that much – I don’t want to learn C++ particularly. I think he mentioned that there are 130,000,000 Symbian devices out there so if mobile development is your thing it’s probably worth checking out.

Phil Nash then did a proper live coding demo of Objective-C and iPhone development. He was a very unassuming guy and I really enjoyed the presentation and the fact it was a proper, from scratch, demo. Also Objective-C really seems quite managable once you get around the INSANE syntax. Seriously. [ Object method Param :yParam ] (something like that anyway…). According to Phil it is to do with Objective-C’s roots in Smalltalk…

Jon Skeet then came up on stage with a pony named Tony and gave a talk – “Humanity Fail” – about our lack of understanding about basic concepts like numbers, strings and time. I thoroughly enjoyed it – I don’t really care about timezones but it was slick and well presented. I also enjoyed having a couple of less tech specific presentations mixed in throughout the day.

Paul Biggar then gave a reasonably in-depth talk about scripting languages, compiler optimisation and I thought it was pretty interesting. Also it was nice to see someone nearer my age giving a talk – and he was impressively confident, prepared and passionate about the topic.

Final talk of the day was left for Christian Heillman. I had actually seen him talk before, with Kristian, a few years back about Ajax and Javascript so I was expecting this to be a fairly solid talk. I was not disappointed – YQL was awesome and the drag-and-drop/build your own grid layout tool also looked really useful.

We grabbed some super tasty Burmese food and then headed to the Big Chill House to wait for our train at Kings Cross/drink beer.

I can tell you now that trains are a far superior form of transport than coaches!

A few beers later and it was 2AM and finally time for bed. All in all a great one and a bit days out!

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Tagged as: events, stackoverflow