musings on software development, writing and life

Ben Forta has blogged regarding the recently announced CFML Language Advisory Committee – a very good read. Despite some cattiness and mild fundamentalism in the comments it’s worth checking out – I’m very glad to see this happening, and will be keeping a close eye on progress, getting involved in any way I can.

Congrats to Adobe and those on the committee – that’s what I call forward thinking.

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Another year of webdu and as usual another success. The highlight of the conference this year I think was the trading card game introduced by Nectarine – people got really into it and it was fun to watch. I’m hoping that next year they’ll add attack and defence or something so we can battle for cards

I must say I missed the banquet this year – I’ve always enjoyed the opportunity to sit and eat with other developers and have a good chat, but while it was a little hard to talk at Kingpin it was definitely fun. Very interesting to see who ended up on the karaoke machine toward the end of the night!

It was a different crowd this year – a lot of the familiar faces but I noticed a lot of the people who’ve been there the last few years were missing. I don’t know if it’s because they were looking for more advanced content perhaps, but it did somewhat change the atmosphere and camaraderie of the conference. The upside to that was that we seemed to have a much larger number of people from the flash and flex worlds among others, so there was a real cross disciplinary thing going on. Hopefully the same people will keep coming back and get to know each other!

One item I want to make a note of was Mike Labriola’s talk on the internal operations occurring in the first few milliseconds of your flex application starting up. Mike is a really nice guy and brilliant while he’s at it. He’s the kind of monkey who just can’t help tearing everything apart, and fortunately he’s all too eager to share his hard won knowledge with us lesser life-forms, so if you get the opportunity to go to any talk of his definitely attend – you’ll learn more useful things in an hour than you might at a whole flex course.

Thanks yet again to Geoff Bowers and the amazing team at Daemon – we’ll see you next year.

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Well I finally found a moment to myself and the energy to blog! Scotch on the Rocks is well over now, but I didn’t want to let it go without a post as it was without doubt the best conference I’ve ever been to.

I had an absolute ball in Edinburgh – the conference itself is as has been mentioned very casual, and as such has a brilliant atmosphere, which I think was a large part of the reason we had such good BoF sessions where everyone joined in, junior and well known developers.

Three days packed full of fun, excellent talks from the intro to the advanced, and some seriously good times catching up, networking and drinking with people from the community. Andy Allan, Big Mad Kev and Stephen Moretti did a brilliant job of managing the event, and were a lot of fun to get to know, not to mention Andy’s lovely and talented wife Leanne, who also had a large hand in the organizing, and was a very gracious hostess

Edinburgh is my favourite city in the world, and it is a fantastic place for a conference. The nature of the setup, plus the type of people the conference attracts made for an amazing junket of learning, sharing and getting to know the community. I met all kinds of people, made some good business contacts and I think made a few new friends as well – and as always it’s nice to be able to catch up in person with those on our IM contacts list whom we only see once or twice a year.

If you didn’t make it to Scotch, I would seriously recommend putting the money aside for next year. Not only is it an absolute blast but it’s a serious investment in your development education and can greatly expand your personal network within the industry. The conference itself could have cost three or four times as much and it would have been worth every penny – I came from Australia and stayed in town for a fortnight and my only regret is that I have to wait another year to do it again!

Congratulations on a brilliant event Andy et al, and thank you very much for an enlightening and hugely fun three days.

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I officially feel like a numpty. For reasons I won’t go into I was absolutely exhausted the other day and made the stupid mistake of trying to repartition my macbook pro and put bootcamp on it. Needless to say i manage to cock up the whole thing and wipe my drive.

To my credit, I only said three bad words.

I hadn’t been reconnecting my external hdd as often as I should have been but still I had a number of backups using leopards Time Machine feature – and as it turned out a full system restore was incredibly easy. I just put in my leopard cd, chose to restore a time machine backup and picked the latest date – an hour or two later bob’s yer wossname and my system is restored. Add to that the fact that my business email runs through gmail’s domain accounts now, I used the “recent:” login feature to get back the last 30 days of my mail ( I had a backup from only 10 days ago anyway) and I’ve lost almost nothing!

Ok so now I’m going to be regularly keeping my external drive plugged in for backups, but the experience has made me seriously consider getting a timecapsule – it’s an external hdd with wireless that can be used for seamless automated time machine backups, which I can imagine might save my bacon some time in the future.

For now I’ve moved my itunes library and my virtual machines onto the same external hdd so that will make sure I have it plugged in at least a few times a week, and I’ll try to get into the habit of always plugging it in when I’m at a desk. In short though, Time Machine is absolutely f’ing brilliant.

The other stupid thing I did was write some blog posts. I wrote a few of them, while away at Philip island on a weekend away without internet connectivity (first time in years – it was… unsettling) I noticed the text file of these bloggages on my desktop today and felt stupid again as I realized I never got around to posting them on the actual blog… I feel a partially connected air app coming on!

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i have made it a point over the years to keep in touch with developers I meet and offer help wherever I can. I’m not great at posting to the mailing lists because I usually get so caught up in what I’m doing that I forget to read them

Lots of people ping me during the day (and sometimes night) for help with cf / flex/ javascript / css etc etc, and there are a bunch of people on my list who I have asked for help with the same when I’m having a brain fart or when I’m doing something i’ve never done before. Some of the people on my list have spent an awful lot of time helping me on occasions, and I always try to return the favour.

The point I’m making is this – network with other developers, stay in touch and reach out when you need help. But more importantly, be ready to help someone out if they ask you a question too – this doesn’t mean drop everything you’re doing and do their work for them, but if you’ve got 5 minutes then share it. A lot of people, including experienced developers, don’t realize how powerful a tool your network of tech savvy friends can be. I’ll be going into more detail about this in my talk at Scotch and (hopefully) WebDU, but I just wanted to throw a quick word out to any who might be listening.

Today I was doing battle with some really appalling actionscript 1 code. I love actionscript 3….
a lovely fellow named Campbell Anderson, who has answered more than a few of my irritating as1 questions lately, has quite patiently helped me through some very weird issues and saved me a lot of time and frustration. I’ll be making sure he knows he’s appreciated

This is one of the great strengths of the cf community, and i’m finding it more and more in flex and flash too. Be generous with your time, and you’ll find that when that moment comes when you really are stuck in a hole for whatever reason, you have allies on hand to help you out.

After all, many minds make light work.

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