Codemash.org wrapup
I stated in an earlier post that in some ways, CodeMash was unlike any other conference I had attended. In other ways however, it was like a lot of the conferences I go to. One of those ways is the quality of Key Note speeches. CodeMash had a very good lineup of speakers.
To kick things off Thursday morning, Neal Ford talked to us for an hour about “Domain Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm”. While this was not my first exposure to the concept of Domain Specific Languages – I believe that was at ZendCon, most likely at Robert ‘r0ml’ Lefkowitz’s closing keynote – it was certainly an excellent one.
Neal’s take on “Domain Specific Languages” (DSL) was that since man has been talking to computers, he’s been trying to get out of the solution domain and closer to the problem that someone is trying to solve, in our coding syntax. He postulates that once a DSL becomes ubiquitous a programmer will be able to more fully communicate with the problem owners. He suggested that programmers may even be able to hold code reviews with the problem owners once the code is expressed in the lexicon of the business unit. He gave several examples of non-computer DSLs including Starbuck’s highly specialized language and then gave Rails as an example of a computer based DSL. I’m leaving out some big points for the sake of brevity but all in all, it was a great speach.
As good as Neal’s session was, it was not the highlight of the conference for me. That came in the afternoon’s keynote, “The World is Dynamic” by Bruce Eckel. As I admitted before, I’m a huge Bruce Eckel fan, quite simply, the man is brilliant. His keynote, “The World is Dynamic” was one of the most unusual keynotes I’ve seen. His points were interspersed with pictures from his last trip to Burning Man. (Yes, I’m one of the hippie wannabe’s that really wants to go to Burning Man. He described his (and his friends) attempts to build things at Burning man (his shade structure, a Tandori oven, etc) and their successes and failures. My “take-away” from the talk was that in software development, as well as Burning Man, you have to use your imagination and think outside normal limits. (The first person who says “think outside the box gets their knuckles rapped with a ruler)
The third and final but by no means the least keynote was Scott Guthrie of Microsoft talking about LINQ or Language Integrated Query. I and several others had dBase II flashbacks on his flirst slide which showed old dBase code for opening a table, updating it and reporting on it. Wow, it’s been a while since coding was that simple.
His main point was (and I’m paraphrasing here) instead of having one way to get data from a database, one way to get it form XML and one way to get it from a collection of objects, it makes more sense to have one common way to query and retrieve data. LINQ is their way of doing that. I’ll have to say, it was pretty impressive stuff.
All three keynotes were excellent and worth the price of admission. (A whopping $149 if you had to pay full-price) Even though PHP wasn’t heavily represented, I still found sessions that were interesting. I think the most obscure one I went to was “SOA as a Conversation” by Ken Faw. It was just…different. Like many of the sessions it wasn’t a “how-to” it was more of a “why do”. He didn’t teach me how to build SOA systems, he taught me how to think about them. I know I’m butchering what he was trying to say just trying to describe it so I’ll just say, if you ever get a chance to see this presentation in person, do it.
The one PHP bright spot at the conference was “Caffinated PHP” presented by Zend’s own Kevin Schroeder. He talked about the new Java Bridge in PHP, specifically about the implementation in Zend Platform and all the cool thing you can do with it. It was a great session and as soon as he releases the slides, I’ll make sure and point you to them.
I ended the conference with a great lunch meeting with Scott Guthrie. I owe a big thank you to the Microsoft Team in general and Drew Robbins in particular. The lunch was attended by about 20 people and it was just an honor to be able to sit and listen to Scott answer questions about future plans etc. (Being the only PHP person in the room, I really didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation.
CodeMash was a different conference than what I’m used to. Yes, there were technical “how to” sessions each day but overall, the conference seemed to be aimed more at thinking about “Why” we do things instead of “How” we do them. Several times in the keynotes I found myself stopping to re-evaluate some aspect of my programming, not because the technical “how” had been questioned but because the reason I do it had been question. I think we all need that from time to time.
The conference was not without it’s warts. There were audio problems from time to time and if you weren’t sitting on the left side of the keynote speaker, all you saw was a silhouette. (For some reason, they only had lights shining form the left side of the room.) However, I do hope they plan on doing it again next year. I’d like to see PHP represented equally with Java and .Net as that would make the conference much more interesting to most of you. However, all things considered, I would recommend CodeMash to any programmer looking to get away from it all and learn.
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