8th Light Blog

Well it’s day three and I’m exhausted. As you may have noticed I posted at 3 AM last night, and getting up at 8 AM wasn’t foremost on my list of “things to do today.” I did it anyway and I’m enjoying a talk on Rails helpers at the moment. While my posting last night was late I actually wrote it much earlier in the day so naturally some things happened after I wrote the post, and not all of them involved beverages that should not be consumed by those that are under 21.

Last night’s keynotes said a lot about the Rails community, and almost nothing about Rails ironically enough. The first was Avi Bryant who challenged us to make Ruby as good as Smalltalk. Avi is clearly a bright guy and an energetic speaker, and his opinions are essentially the opposite of the ‘Rails’. While I certainly wouldn’t say I agree with everything he said, the challenge to make Ruby and thereby Rails as fast as Smalltalk is one that we as a community should certainly consider.

The other was Ze Frank. He probably needs no introduction to much of the web, but he didn’t say the words “Ruby” or “Rails” once. He did nearly make us wet ourselves with laughter. I’m going to have to spend some time at www.zefrank.com.

I mentioned that they said a lot about us, as a community, and to illustrate this I want you to think of an ASP conference, put on by Microsoft. Do you think they’d invite somebody from the Rails community to come in and tell them their framework bites? No, of course not. Large corporate-backed frameworks do not accept challenges. They spend their time trying to sell you things to debug their already perfect technology. We, as a group, invite people to challenge us because it requires us to think about and defend our own position. If we’re wrong, we admit we’re wrong. If we’re right than that position must be defensible. We all came from different backgrounds, and came to Rails because we continually challenged our assumptions. Let’s continue to do so.

What Ze Frank as a keynote said about us is simple, we’re fun. I’m sure you’ve been to a big corporate event where a few suits tell some in-jokes or make a skit that’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not because nobody can actually say anything that might upset the big honchos. This is a group that has no problem with keynote speakers dropping an F-bomb, and I haven’t seen a single tie. Man it’s refreshing.

Had a lot of fun meeting a bunch of you last night. Looking forward to that today too.

Hello again from RailsConf. I’ve gone through five presentations. I don’t have any enormous revelations, and no good pictures yet, but I do have some observations. I’ll do this Larry King style.

…Uncle Bob and Jim Weirich are great public speakers. I’ve seen Uncle Bob do most of the CleanCode talk before, and I’ll go again at Agile 2007…Went for a run yesterday, Portland is quite pretty…Everyone I’ve met here has been unfailingly interesting, with nobody trying to ‘network’ just meet people like normal human beings…Spider Man 3 was mildly disappointing …If you get a chance to download the slides from Spam I Have Known, do so. Hugely entertaining…If you add videos to your presentation it’s fun, but not as much fun as genuine enthusiasm about your topic.

Okay I can’t do that for very long, how did Larry do it for 20 years? The highlights from today would have to be three things:

• Keynote. The tone here is very different from your typical stuffy conference, and it’s great. Chad Fowler playing the ukulele, DHH referring to ‘unicorns’, I doubt you see these at a Windows Vista conference. Well you probably do, but it’s forced and trite. There’s a genuine enthusiasm here, because what we have here are 1600 developers who are all passionate craftsman who would do this for free. To any potential customers: That last part was a joke. We like to be paid. Speaking of paying, Dave Thomas gave a talk (which Gilberto attended) on Rails for charity, and that charity is still open at:

http://pragmaticstudio.com/dontate

Charity good, give some.

• Clean Code. Uncle Bob is a “friend of the program” as they say in college and rather closely related to my boss, so my opinion is biased admittedly, but his speech today was packed and as always well received. If you want to see what he talked about hold the apple or ctrl key and click http://www.objectmentor.com. That will open the site in a new window, so you don’t go away.

• Spam I have known. The presentations I saw the rest of the day were up/and/down. Nothing was bad exactly, and I know these people put a lot of effort into them so I won’t name names, but there wasn’t much memorable. I was beginning to think I’d have to make up something to blog today, until seeing Jim Weirich’s presentation on spam. Ruse has a really nice algorithm for detecting spam which has quite a few features but it centers around an idea so obvious you’ll wish you’d thought of it, the Tarpit. Spammers routinely defeat sites with one thing - feedback! They attack a site trying different things until they figure out why they were rejected. A Tarpit takes spam and doesn’t give them an error message, it puts it in the Tarpit. They think that their spam was successful, so they don’t change the spam. I think I’m going to grab it and try it for my personal wiki, which has never been replaced since I left the evils of corporate America.

Work has me visit lots of software teams around the world. This past week I visited a particularly fun team. They worked in a large open work area with desk space for pairing and wall space for BCV (Big Visible Charts). Anyhow, there was one member in particular, I’ll call him Dan, that was notorious for his mischief. Most notably, he’d start paper bullet wars.

Paper bullet is not the term they used but that’s what I’m gonna call it. What you do is tear off a piece of paper and roll it lengthwise. Then fold it fold it in half so you’ve got a wedge shaped paper bullet. Then take a rubber band and stretch it between your thumb and index finger. Slide the wedge onto the center of the rubber band, stretch, aim, and release.

Dan had apparently surprised everyone on the team with a paper bullet in the face or neck at one point or another. They held a friendly grudge against him.

Early in the week I was unaware of the paper bullet wars and I found it peculiar that there were all these bit of paper on the floors and desks. Apparently wars were taking place all week but, being the guest, no one wanted to hit me and so who ever was pairing with me had immunity.

In the final hours of the last day they confessed at how nice they were and how lucky I was that I didn’t get shot all week. Frankly I was disappointed that I didn’t get to play all week so I spat out some fighting words… “You’re lucky you never got me involved!”. It began. I could hear them whistle past my ears as I was writing so unit tests or bounce off the wall behind me as I pass the keyboard to my pair, but I never got hit.

Thankfully, other team member armed me a rubber band and a hand full of paper bullets. At a quiet moment, I figured I’ve give this game a try. Grabbing the rubber band and paper wedge, I loaded and aimed right at Dan’s head. The rubber band was surprisingly flexible. Not knowing how hard to stretch it, I just kept pulling. As I looked down the trajectory, I was sure the projectile would curve. When I released I was shocked and horrified.

The bullet screamed across the room, straight as an arrow, pegging Dan right in the side of the head. It made a loud smacking noise upon impact. The whole team heard it and the room went silent. I was terrified. This was no way to treat your clients, I thought. The poor guy never even hit me so he didn’t deserve it. Apparently I was wrong. Everyone else thought he deserved it. The room broke out in laughter. Team members (not Dan) gave me a thumbs up, telling me “Thanks” or “Good job”.

I apologized to Dan later, trying not to stare at the red welt just below his temple. Dan, the sportsman that he is, congratulated me on my marksmanship. He’s a good guy.

So what’s the moral of the story? None really. But I will note that many of the development environments I visit are much more sterile and “professional” than this team…. and much less productive as well.

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 10:21:32, Greg, hey !? Did you visit my office recently and I didn’t know? We’re also doing this, but since there’s only 3 of us in the office, we sometimes have to use other targets than ourselves (when the red marks are becoming too obvious). We just destroyed an ugly dummy cd of some bad dutch singer here.

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 02:52:29, Mike, My mother used to say it’s only fun until someone’s eye is put out!

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:49:47, Dan (yes that one), Injury update The swelling is down…I can see out of that eye now…hope you come back soon :) :) :)

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 06:44:08, Ryan Platte, Nice shot! Don’t be surprised if I hang out by a pillar if you come to another Chirb meeting, yikes!