Yesterday I spent almost all day underground - at the Seattle Leopard Tech Talk that Apple hosted. It was a pretty good set of details and talks, tending towards the high level stuff, but there was a fair bit that got really down and dirty with the details. Best of all, there were Apple engineers available up here to talk to, ask questions, and sync up with.
A lot of good details were updated from the WWDC set of information. And yeah, the whole darn thing is under NDA, so while I can talk about the fact that it was pretty good, any specifics sort of get shut down.
One thing that’s public that I really glommed on to - DTrace freakin’ rocks!
On one hand, it’s sort of darkly amusing the the crew of OReilly coined the term “Web 2.0″ and now they’re selling market reports ala Gartner Group on it.
I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising - the O’Reilly crew has been heading sort of in this direction for a while with their focus on emerging technology, the “radar” blog, and the general continued research and pontification about various geeky things.
Well, Ignite Seattle was a lot of fun. It completely overwhelmed the space that was reserved for it - clearly it was something who’s time was due. I think the second and third (there will hopefully be more) will be a little less packed as the newness wears off. The first one is always “there may never be another!” sort of frenzied.
The popsicle stick bridge building contest was neat - Karen and I came in just as they were starting judging it (we ate dinner first at Crave, just above CHAC - where we were hosted tonight). It definitely got everyone sort of in tune with the evening and how things would roll.
The “lightning talks” where a huge mixture that was really great to see. One of the best things from MindCamp, and I think the talks there were every bit as compelling, and it was really fun to see a forced time slide show set like that. Brian Akers was hilarious in his talk on Asterisk.
The django online book received a chapter update - Inside the template engine, Python creator Guido Rossum announced that he’d starting using Django at the big “G” for a code review critter he called Mondrian, and the crew that’s done the multiple DB support for Django is in the process of merging their work into the mainline!
I really do rather wish we could see Mondrain and get a sense of what Guido cooked up for that code review mechanism. I’ve actually never been involved in a particularly smooth code review process, and I’m curious what technical things he may have used to assist. BTW: I’m not in any way saying that code reviews are bad - the cultures of the companies I’ve been involved with have just made then, er, contentious more than not.
