This is very exciting for me, because although my mother took me there more than a couple times when I was small, I have no memory of having ever been to New Orleans. I’m very happy to be remedying this omission in my Stateside travels.

Best yet: because I am an excellent husband, I’m staying in New Orleans a couple extra days beyond the conference so that The Wife can come out on Saturday to join me for some of those famous “good times”.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Depending on how things go, I might actually report back with details of what we ate and what we drank and what we saw. Or maybe not.

I’m sure I’ll post more about it later, but if it’s your thing, you might want to follow the #mountainrb hashtag on Twitter as well as this Twitter list of attendees, speakers and sponsors I’ve tried to build.

My various social network feeds are bound to be pretty single-focus for the next few days, so fair warning.

Ignite Boulder 11 was pretty awesome.

Great crowd, amazing venue, and pretty high level sparks, too. (The one about MS being a plumbing problem rather than an auto-immune disease was a jaw-dropper for me.)

Check the pics and stuff.

This is me every time I have to call a phone number with my iPhone:

1. Press the “Home” button
2. Realize that was unnecessary because the “Phone App” is one of the four apps that shows up regardless of what screen I’m on.
3. Open the “Phone App”
4. Take a second to realize which screen I’m looking at (generally “Recents” or something).
5. Take another second to realize that I need to find the number pad and do so.

From there on, I’m cool, but it’s such a clunky interaction that I am 90% sure is my problem, not the iPhone’s. Perhaps I should make myself start calling people more often before my telephone muscles atrophy altogether…

Examples:

1. Some thing wild is just about to happen at this get-together.
2. But not as wild as what’s already going on at this shindig.
3. But then, there’s wild and then there’s these fellows…

You’re welcome.

You know, if you feel like it…

Pls reply me back

Happy New Year…

I’m sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it’s  just because of the situation of things right now, i’m stuck in London, I came down here on vacation, i was robbed, worse  of it is that bags, cash and cards and my cell phone was stolen at GUN  POINT, it’s such a crazy experience for me, i need help flying back home, the authorities are not being 100% supportive but the good thing is i still have my passport but don’t have enough money to get my flight ticket back home, please i need you to loan me some money, will refund you as  soon as i’m back home, i promise.

Thank you
Rand Winton

Hmmm. No. That’s not real at all.

I replied to it and the hijackers further prompted me to provide help. So they are actively using her account. Great.

After texting her (she’s been bombarded by all her contacts checking whether she’s OK or letting her know she’s been hacked) I tried to login. Of course her password didn’t work. I tried the password retrieval mechanism and it said it was sending the change request email to an address that looks like ******@y****.**.uk — also not my mother.

So, I have reported the problem to Google and am waiting for their response.

It looks like these people also deleted an announcement I posted to Mom’s Facebook wall, too, so I assume they are in there also.

Sometimes the internet is such a jerk!

Update: She has managed to wrangle her Gmail out of the clutches of the baddies. Her Facebook account is currently locked down, but she’s barely concerned about that.

I despise that question. My mental answer to queries of that ilk is usually something along the lines of “Not in a room like this answering questions like that!”

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why managers feel like they have to ask those questions. They feel a responsibility to motivate the people who report to them to do quality work — a task that must be akin to herding cats. I certainly wouldn’t want the job of keeping people like me motivated and focused!

Here’s my true answer to that old trope of one-on-ones across the globe:

I want to have a fulfilling job doing challenging work with a group of people whose company I enjoy.

And guess what? That’s what I have right now. If my career is in a similar place as it is today in five years’ time, that will be flat out awesome.

What got me started on this rant is chapter 46 of Chad Fowler‘s excellent book The Passionate Programmer – Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development. That chapter is titled “Path with no Destination” and posits that a career is not merely a means to achieving a goal or set of goals, but actually is the goal:

So, instead of constantly asking “Are we there yet? Are we There yet?” realize that the only healthy answer is “yes.” It’s how you traverse the path that’s important — not the destination.

This is something I’ve felt for ages, but all of my own attempts to articulate it have come off as apathy (at times it probably was apathy, to be honest). The thing is, when I say “right here” when I get asked the five year question, I don’t mean working at the same desk, doing the same tasks for the same people. No, I mean getting paid to do work that keeps me as engaged as my work currently does with people who are way more awesome than I am.

What I’m saying is I’m in a really great spot right now and I’d like to be in an equally great spot in five, ten, or twenty years from now.

There’s underlying context to that: I’ve actually worked pretty hard to get where I am. The thing is, if I want my future to be as superlative as my current situation, I will probably have to work even harder in the days to come. The slope doesn’t ease off, really. It keeps rising. I need to learn new things from new people and do more and read more and see more. I need to be motivated to improve. That motivation comes primarily from myself, but it never hurts to have effective leadership from others. (Keyword there is “effective“.)

So yeah, I have a “five year plan”. It’s the same plan I’ve had for the past five years, and the five before that.

It’s a good plan. I may not have 100% execution on it, but I’m pretty clear about what it is.

Maybe you should try a plan like mine, too.

The majority of the crowd were Ruby/Rails developers, but there were a few Pythonistas, Scala fans, Apple/iPhone Objective C hackers, and even one C++ programmer. One of the attendees was actually a former co-worker from the Data Slaughterhouse days. It was nice to see a familiar face.

Other noteworthy trends:

• MacBook Pros were almost ubiquitous.
• iPhones were almost as common, though a few guys were proud of their mobile phones that are actually primarily phones.
• No big surprise, it was a total sausage-fest. There was one woman in attendance. One.

I’ll give some of my notes from the presentations after the jump, so feel free to move along if that’s not your thing.

Chad Fowler — The Passionate Programmer

This talk is based on Chad’s book of the same name and was a hell of a way to get things started. Chad offered up some great inspiration. Some notes:

• Having a plan (even one that turns out to be wrong) will make things seem easier.
• Don’t just say “I’ve always wanted to …” Go out and do it!
• Innate talent (or the belief that you have it) can make you lazy. Practice makes you better.
• The easiest way to market yourself is to be remarkable. Let others sell you.
• Another way to market yourself is to be a guide. People talk about the guy that teaches them something.
• “I am a …” can be dangerous. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself

Chris Perkins — TurboGears: An Exercise in Natural Selection

TuboGears is a Python MVC web framework. Chris told us about the evolution of the framework. The TG team is always striving for the best in class tools, which means they have switched the libraries they’ve used for ORM, web server, templating engines, and front-end scripting. This makes TG incredibly flexible, but my reaction was that it was a bit too flexible. It’s an impressive framework, but it struck me a bit chaotic.

Rob Sanheim — The Cloud – Real World Applications and Pragmatics

Rob showed us some awesome real world uses for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). After making the point that “software as a service” (like GMail, etc.) is not the same as cloud computing, he showed us some really cool projects he’s working on. First was run>code>run, a continuous integration service that integrates with GitHub. Then he used a new project called braincron, a natural language reminder application, to demonstrate setting up a new EC2 node with automated configuration using Chef Solo. Pretty impressive stuff, most of which was over my head — I’ll have to change that!

Jeremy Hinegardner — Playing Nicely with Others

Jeremy’s presentation was all about how we as developers always use more than one language in a project. For example, I use Ruby, T-SQL, JavaScript, and some amount of HTML + CSS in every project I work on. This reinforced Chad Fowler’s point that telling someone “I am a Rails developer” is kind of silly (although using the framework might imply the multiplicity). Jeremy covered some commonalities of programming languages and application tools: data structures, communication, persistence. He then covered some interesting new tools that are available right now, such as: Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant, Redis, Beanstalkd, and MongoDB. MongoDB actually got a lot of love during the day — something to look into.

After Jeremy’s talk we broke for lunch, which was then followed by a handful of “lightning” talks — five minute presentations:

• David Eisinger gave an overlapping intro to Ruby and Mid-90s Hip Hop which featured lots of fun using the “say” command in Mac OS X.
• Jason Turner showed off ChaiScript, a C++ scripting language.
• Ben Reubenstein suggested we think about donating our time to good causes in order to expand out skillset productively.
• Bobby Wilson ranted a bit against templating systems in Rails.
• Jess Martin gave a passionate overview of “The One True Way of CSS”, with which I completely agreed.
• Ben Scofield talked a lot about how convoluted comics books and the comics publishing industry is and a little bit about how a relational database might not be the best way to model them.

David Eisinger — Email Interfaces for Your Ruby Apps

David is another member of the Viget crew. He started his presentation with a sort of philosophical discussion of email interfaces to web apps: why they are a good idea, hurdles to overcome, things to be careful of, good examples from the real world (people mentioned TripIt.com several times). He definitely opened my eyes to the idea of using email, which even your Nana knows how to use, as an interface to an application. The latter half of the talk was left to briefly covering all of the technical aspects of an email interface, from the mail server, the software you use to fetch the mail, and finally how you process the email messages. Not a ton of details, but a great topic.

Derek Chen-Becker — Stepping Up: A Brief Intro to Scala

I must confess that before this presentation, I had moved to the back of the room to find a power outlet for my laptop, so I really didn’t give my full attention. Even given that, I have to say Scala is pretty interesting. It compiles to 100% Java bytecode and is sometimes even “better” than compiled Java. I’ve never learned Java — static typing honestly makes me itchy. Scala feels a lot more like a dynamic scripting language and seems more approachable to a monkey like me. It’s not the prettiest code I’ve eer seen, but it’s interesting enough that it’s on my radar now.

Bill Dudney — Core Animation on the iPhone and Mac

Bill “wrote the book” on iPhone development. I was mostly excited for his talk just to get a little exposure to Objective C, and … wow. In the words of the day’s final keynote speaker, Bruce Eckel, “I don’t know what the square brackets do. I see there are a lot of them…” Getting past that, Bill made great points about using animation in iPhone apps to make the user experience more “real”. He also showed us how the core animation libraries handle a lot of the heavy lifting of animation for you. Pretty neat stuff.

Bruce Eckel — The Archaeology of Language Features in C++, Java and Python

Talk about writing the book! Bruce wrote what many folks consider seminal tomes for both C++ and Java. He’s over that, now, though. These days Bruce loves his Python. (Incidentally, he likes Flex for UIs.) His presentation covered some of the decisions that negative affected those older, static languages – in particular the mandate for backward compatibility. As counter examples, he mentioned that both Python and Ruby have recently undergone major overhauls that have changed or dropped functionality entirely. The big pull-quote from Bruce’s talk, though, was his feeling that with the help of new players like Scala, Java is fast approaching “legacy” status. I’m cool with that.

And that was that. I bailed on the after-conference beers, opting for the company of my darling wife instead, but I really enjoyed Developer Day. If it comes to your town, definitely go.

BTW: In many cases, if you go to the blogs of the speakers linked above, you’ll find their write-ups of the day, too. Always an interesting exercise to see how others see events…