ivantohelpyou

I've commandered Boris Mann's office to write this at the Super Happy Grow-Op Dev House (an idea born in San Francisco Super Happy Dev House) here at Bryght Headquarters in Vancouver. I know it's Boris's office because his Northern Voice badge is on the table, as is a post-it note that says, "BORIS, YOU ARE THE SEXIEST DRUPAL BITCH EVER! - JOHN BOLLWITT." We'll get to Boris later in the post.

I found out about the event by bumping into Luke Closs from Socialtext on the plane back from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The basic idea of the SH(GO)DH, scheduled from 1pm to 1am today (a Friday), was to invite the hacker elite of Vancouver to a single space to work on stuff together, while scarfing down a few pizzas and a keg of beer. And wouldn't you know it, people were actually working on stuff.

I showed up at the event with my laptop, but figured that the best way to do something productive was to keep the laptop holstered and take out the pen and paper to do some old-fashioned reporting.

The Bryght offices in Vancouver's Gastown feature a long workbench-style desk where about 24 people at a time can plug in. On the other side of the open-plan office, there's the NowPublic offices, with a similar arrangement. Along the wall, there are a few private offices, including the one I commandeered to do my writing. I'm so past open-plan workspaces. Unless there's a nice paycheck with benefits attached to it.

Anyway, I walked up and down the workbench, asking people what on earth they were doing here. After all, there was a keg of beer and a few hot dogs upstairs, and so it had to be something pretty compelling to get people to work at a communal social event.

Here's what I found:

• A developer building a GUI test harness using Flapjax. Remind me to Google "test harness."
  
• Luke figured out a way to store information from unit testing on a wiki. Every time I talk to Luke, he's figured out a way to put something new on a wiki. Luke loves wikis, let's face it.
• Chris Simmons refactoring a UI.
  
  Now, in my day-to-day existence, someone refactoring an UI would get a nod of fake comprehension. But today, I just had to ask, "what's refactoring?" And I'm glad I did. I got a good lesson on the concept of extreme programming.
  
  It's a three-stage process: RED-GREEN-REFACTOR.
  1) RED - Write unit tests. This is basically a list of the things that a program has to do before it's complete.
  2) GREEN - Write a program that passes the unit tests.
  3) REFACTOR - Rewrite the program using better programming practices.
  
  We kept talking, and I learned something else. There's a programming language called Haskell, a "functional" programming language that basically takes a mathematical proof and turns it into a line of computer code with a minimum of fuss. For someone like Chris with a math background, that's good stuff. For me, I'd need to hack through an entire page of code to accomplish the same thing.
  
• Roland Tanglao from Bryght was trying to put a Python compiler on his Nokia N93, which would let him hack a way to get the camera to do something that it originally wasn't built to do. We'll call it "Snakes on a Phone."
  
• A French blogger and web designer demonstrated how he develops web sites. Not with Dreamweaver or anything like that. He relies on a Firefox plug-in called Firebug, a Mac program called TextMate, and that's it. We also talked politics given the recent election of Sarkozy.
  
• People taking pictures of each other for the inevitable Flickr stream.
  
• A blogger encouraging Vancouverites to spend locally.
• A developer studying at SFU was helping the above blogger to build a Drupal site. He's also involved in the "Google Summer of Code," with the intention of writing a Drupal module to allow people who run Drupal sites to get a sense of which Drupal modules are burning up the most bandwidth and processing time through the use of automated test cases. Very meta. We also talked about Plone, which he said requires a lot of overhead. Then, I asked about the difference between Ruby and Python. He said that Ruby on Rails was popular because for many developers, it was their first framework. But that doesn't mean it's the best. However, it also has more "scaffolding" to minimizes code during initial development. Django, which is based on Python, and which I mentioned in a previous post, can do a lot of the same stuff, but it's still prior to the 1.0 release and it needs a bit more scaffolding. (Don't you wish you were there?)
  
• I went upstairs for some more beer, and ran into Mack Hardy and Boris Mann (whose office I am currently pilfering) working the grill. Mack (from affinitybridge.com) talked about OG2List, a Drupal plug-in which clones the functionality of Yahoo! Groups. We then talked about the desirability of running your group on your own site, rather than on a commercial site like Yahoo! that's going to spam your membership, place ads in-between messages, and who knows what else they have buried in those terms of service. And then I had a long talk with Boris, who preached the Drupal gospel like I've never heard it before. He has a nice office but not a lot of good stuff to pilfer, as it turns out, short of his car keys.
  
• I met a coterie of Vancouver's finest bloggers, including Retrocactus, Miss604 and John Bollwitt. We talked about the benefits of blogging. For instance, do you put yourself out there in a blog, knowing that potential employers might read it? Well, in Miss604's case, she was hired as a result of her skill as a blogger. Bottom line: You have to be yourself, and if someone doesn't get it, you probably don't want to work there. Then, we talked about how the traditional formula for public speaking ("Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em) translates perfectly to blogging. You can do one post before you're going to do something, one post about what you did, and then another one later to say, "hey, look what I wrote." Three-for-one.
  
• I spoke with someone from the Committee for Open Source Technology and Applications Research at Simon Fraser, about applications that allow people to work on the same document (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet document) at the same time. We also talked about the state-of-the-art online apps, and he said that they're not yet good enough to replace your desktop apps. That'll make my next article for SmallBizResource a little easier.
  
• Dustin Sacks hooked me up with his Risk-like board game, Lux, which is going to be an AWESOME timewaster. We talked about the good old days of Risk on the Mac, including the challenge of beating a whole world of neutral players, or any of my high school friends who were foolish enough to challenge my global dominance.
  
• Ifky from Freegeek, wearing her radioactive-chartreuse safety glasses, gave me the full Freegeek reuse pitch. They take your old computers and either redeploy them in the field, or take them apart in an environmentally-friendly manner. And if you contribute 24 hours of work to the organization, they'll give you a free Pentium 3-era computer! Whether you're a potential contributor of your time or your old computers, check them out! And if there's no Freegeek near you, start your own!
  

And that's my report.

Labels: blogging, shdh, social networks