Kings of Code 2009, day 2

It’s been a few weeks since the con­fer­ence and we’ve had time to reflect. This blog post is an inven­tory of the things learned so that we may remem­ber them until next sum­mer and the next Kings of Code. If I’m still in Ams­ter­dam then, I’ll def­i­nitely attend.

What are the expectations?

I can only speak for myself and I attend this kind of events to learn about new tech­nolo­gies, go deeper into cur­rent ones and hear thoughts and opin­ions from the front-line of our indus­try. Besides all that—and by far the biggest rea­son for attending—is the inspi­ra­tion one gets from being in the same room as so many other pas­sion­ate peo­ple, lis­ten­ing to tal­ented speak­ers talk about what they love; in this case, web development.

Which leads us to the first speaker of the con­fer­ence day.

Remem­ber the Magick

Aral Balkan

If I recall cor­rectly, Aral is liv­ing in the UK but speak­ing with an Amer­i­can accent (this puz­zles me). He’s also one of the most tal­ented speak­ers I’ve lis­tened to. The intro song really grabbed people’s atten­tion and set the mood for the remain­ing hour. The title was “Remem­ber the Mag­ick” and I believe that at the essence of the talk was the ques­tion; why do we do what we do?

Aral used a word that was a spot on per­fect answer; delight. At least for me, cre­at­ing delight­ful expe­ri­ences is the most reward­ing aspect of our job. Mak­ing users smile or feel even a resem­blance of a delight­ful sen­sa­tion gives a sat­is­fac­tion no salary could.

The talk made us remem­ber the magic that brought us to where we are right now. Aral, if you’re read­ing this, thanks for a great and inspi­ra­tional speech that moti­vates us to keep going where our heart tells us to go. I also love the advice you gave afterwards—to a per­son ques­tion­ing a cur­rent job situation—which was sim­ply to “quit, life’s to short.”

By the way, he has a blog and he’s post­ing some pretty inter­est­ing tweets now and then.

Build­ing the Next Gen­er­a­tion of Web Apps with Objective-J and Cappuccino

Fran­cisco Tol­masky & Jorn van Dijk

Next up was a pre­sen­ta­tion about Cap­puc­cino, a web appli­ca­tion frame­work. It uses a lan­guage called Objective-J and it all looks very sweet. We saw some exam­ples of desk­top grade appli­ca­tions that run smoothly within a browser win­dow. Good thing is, it’s all based on Javascript.

Another really cool thing was the upcom­ing inter­face builder Atlas, which I’m really look­ing for­ward to play­ing with. The whole pre­sen­ta­tion was inter­est­ing and excit­ing, though I doubt I’ll be using this in a project for a while since I build exclu­sively client web­sites and not web appli­ca­tions. How­ever, I can’t wait to build­ing some small app just to try it out.

Rich and Snappy Apps, No Scal­ing Required

Thomas Fuchs & Amy Hoy

This was per­haps my favorite tech­ni­cal pre­sen­ta­tion at the event. I’m really enjoy­ing front-end devel­op­ment and spend­ing time on things like Javascript. Thomas and Amy walked us through a lot of good points on Javascript per­for­mance and best prac­tices. All in all, very use­ful, prac­ti­cal and enjoy­able pre­sen­ta­tion by two enter­tain­ing speakers.

While I’m using jQuery, the speak­ers rec­om­mended Pro­to­type. This makes me won­der if there’s really a rea­son for switch­ing, or if it’s a mat­ter of per­sonal pref­er­ence. I’m guess­ing the lat­ter and that Thomas is a bit biased, hav­ing cre­ated the script.aculo.us framework.

Other rec­om­men­da­tions from the speak­ers were Sprock­ets for cleaner JS and Smush.it for image opti­miza­tion. I’ll check out their new book, Javascript Per­for­mance Rocks!

And a lot more…

All above men­tioned talks were before lunch and after lunch we attended the fol­low­ing, which I don’t have time to go into. If you have any ques­tions regard­ing this event or if you’re think­ing about going next year, feel free to pop me an email.

The Open & Social Web by Chris Chabot
The Straight Truth About Ruby on Rails by Geof­frey Grosen­bach
The Future of Code by Steven Pem­ber­ton
Scal­ing your Tech & your Team by Joe Stump

Not hav­ing touched or read about Rails before the event, I’m excited about it. It seems like a very com­fort­able frame­work to work with and I’d love to try it out. Geof­frey Grosen­back of Peep­code gave us an excel­lent intro­duc­tion which dis­cussed exam­ples and advan­tages as well as down-sides.

Steven Pem­ber­ton is also a great man who gave a thor­ough talk on the his­tory of the web, the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and how the future will look like. Joe Stump, ex-Digg.com devel­oper talked about scal­ing both your team to the sites you make—very inter­est­ing advice on how to cope with growth and work with developers.

Final thoughts

I got what I expected from the event and will def­i­nitely go next year if I’m still liv­ing in Ams­ter­dam. It’s about gain­ing knowl­edge but also—perhaps even more so—a gath­er­ing of pas­sion­ate peo­ple. In the end, you’re left with new ideas, moti­va­tion and inspi­ra­tion that will last you a while.

Pho­tos from Kings of Code day one are already on Flickr and the rest will be there soon. Just too bad my iPhone took bet­ter pho­tos than the crappy old Minolta I bor­rowed from the office. (Which, by the way, I had to feed 16 batteries.)

EDIT: Pho­tos from day two are now on Flickr.

Thanks

I’d like to thank all the speak­ers and the peo­ple work­ing at the event for a great time, and of course also MARS media for the tick­ets. See you next year!

• Novem­ber 20, 2009
• Day 15: Web Design Best Practices
• Day 13: Safari 5 First Impressions
• Day 25: Speeches Are Hot
• Take a Week to Get Organized