Back in June, a whole lot of folks in the Ruby world were getting excited about Gitjour and it’s *jour brethren. Read Dr Nic for the lowdown. He was particularly excited about the potential of using all these automated DNSSD-powered advertising services at the forthcoming Railscamp #3. And so was I.

I installed every one of those suckers, and fired them up, and had a play. They were awesome ideas but I thought they were a bit limited in their execution. Don’t get me wrong, as a quick conference hack, they’re brilliant. And for quickly sharing some cool shiz with your friends in the back of a session - perfect. Not so good for 4 days of intense hackery with 60-something coders on the one network. Not so good as a day-to-day tool in a work environment.

Railscamp #3

I spent the first portion of Friday night at Railscamp catching up with folks, as you do. Having a few beers, seeing what they’ve been doing and talking about what we’re going to build over the weekend. I think I might have pointed out the potential for new features in Gitjour just a few times. Just once or twice, you know?

Finally, Mike Bailey calls me on it and we get coding. And everybody I’d whinged to about the potential of Gitjour joins in.

By the end of last Railscamp, we’d refactored significantly, squished many bugs, added proxies for cloning and remotes as well as a search. Not to mention spawned a couple of side-projects: Gitman and Gitnotify.

All our code ended up in the Railscamp repo where, except for an excellent summary post from Lachie Cox, we all forgot about it.

Fedex IX

Atlassian has a quarterly hacking event called Fedex (“deliver overnight”). Basically, everybody gets from 2pm Thursday (in Sydney) to 4pm Friday to hack up whatever they like as long as it is somewhat associated with the company. Then they present, and everybody votes for awesomeness. You’ll have heard of similar events at other companies etc.

Fedex IX was a week ago, and Don Brown hit me up, asking for a method to allow easy local sharing of git repositories. He has a grand master plan I’m sure he will reveal in time.

That’s when I realised we never told anybody about our revamp of Gitjour. We never pimped all the badass improvements we made. That’s dumb for so many reasons, but the biggest is easily that there are hackers out there who need a sweet tool for sharing git repos with colleagues and friends and we didn’t tell them. This makes me sad.

So, my Fedex project quickly became shaping our Gitjour into something nice and stable for everybody else to enjoy. I forked Chad Fowler’s original and I worked out how to mash it together with ours. There are probably faster and neater methods, but I found one that worked. Boy, did I learn a few things about Git that day!

Then I made a couple of bug fixes, tidied things up, battled multiple methods of gem building until I got them to work and made my first ever pull request on Github. Hopefully, Chad will be happy to merge all our work in, but meanwhile you can get all that railscamping goodness on my Github account, or just install the gem:

sudo gem install lachlanhardy-gitjour

Railscamp #4

Very soon, a bunch of hackers are going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere on one network and need to share their work. And I’m going to be there, pointing out what’s wrong with Gitjour and why we should merge in Gitnotify and Gitman so that we have one seriously badass tool that’ll make working with Git the easiest thing you’ve ever done. Sharing those repos can be easier than it is now. And it should be.

And when we’ve built more crazy awesomeness, I’m going to remember to scream it from the rooftops because I want everybody to know that the tools are already here - they just need a little more work. Do you want to help?

I was very pleased to be speaking at Remix Australia this week. Thanks must go to Michael Kordahi, Shane Morris, and Nick Hodge for trusting that a guy who hadn’t done a public presentation in nearly a year could deliver the goods.

Talking ‘bout a revolution

Damian Edwards and I were asked to do the IE8 session together. The point of the session was to give an overview of the new features and capabilities, in particular the brand-spanking new standards-compliant rendering engine. We also decided to make the most of the opportunity to pimp standards-based design methodologies and concepts to the .NET and Silverlight focused crowd.

Damian took responsibility for developing solid demos to illustrate standards-based design techniques and the innovations in IE8 such as WebSlices and Activities. I delivered the historical context, the philosophy and the concepts we wanted to impart.

I think we ended up with a solidly crafted presentation that wove the themes of Internet Explorer 8’s development principles, standards-based design philosophies and best practice web innovation together. We’ve had some great feedback so far and one member of the Melbourne audience even said: That was the most concise succinct explanation of those concepts I’ve ever heard. This was the most productive session of the day for me. Obviously Damian and I are rapt that somebody felt so strongly about our work. That really made the day for me.

Huge thanks to Damian for all the work he put in to make sure we nailed it!

I’ve added the presentation to Slideshare, although it won’t be anywhere near as cool without all the demos and we used the slides for points of reference rather than as detailed content:

| View | Upload your own

Turns out Damo posted the code from the demos on his blog.

Rolling with my homies

As ever, the absolute best part of the conference was all the amazing incredible talented people I got to meet, talk with and hang with.

Mark Pesce delivered a stirring call to action for all developers in the keynote. We hold the key to the future. We’re the ones who can empower both the public and our own organisations by building the right tools. You can read his speech in its entirety on his blog and the video has just been posted. Go get some!

I met the incredibly friendly folks from Soul Solutions at the first speaker rehearsals. Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien are two of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve met in a long time and they build awesome stuff too as I discovered when I watched their demos in the Windows Live Platform sessions. I’ve been expecting to see presence indication in more and more sites and it was cool to see how they’d integrated IM into their applications seamlessly.

My favourite presentation of the conference was easily the one covering the new possibilities in Silverlight 2. Jonas Follesø built an awesome Twitter/Flickr mashup in front of us in about 35 minutes, while explaining in precise detail every step and the reasoning for it. The source and slides are available at that link. If that wasn’t incredible enough (and it was), José Fajardo demonstrated some really astonishing DeepZoom prototypes he’d built.

José decided that people haven’t recognised the true potential in DeepZoom and so he asked himself 3 questions, then tried to answer them each in code within 30 minutes. He showed us the results and convinced me, at least, that we need to be looking much further ahead than we have been with interactions on the web.

His questions went something like this:

1. What if every image on the web were DeepZoomable?
2. What if we had full control over every document on the web?
3. What if people could share DeepZoom images easily?

I don’t have the precise questions and I don’t want to steal his thunder for when he blogs it (you are blogging this, right, José?), but his examples were simply phenomenal. I’m going to be asking myself a lot of questions like this in future – to help myself stretch my knowledge and use of the technologies I know. And to stretch how they’re used by everyone. 30 minute prototyping exercises are the way of the future!

In combination, the presentation by Jonas and José convinced me that I need to learn Silverlight. There is much potential for awesomeness there, if used properly.

I also met the very talented, very cool Hege Rokenes. She’s a Norwegian graphic designer who’s freelancing in Melbourne for the next year or so. She won the Silverlight video clip contest with her Step Back video (Silverlight required – of course). She’s looking for more freelance or a position with a Melbourne company. If you want a talented designer with an interest in web standards and Silverlight, you’d be crazy not to look her up.

I finally got to meet Tatham Oddie, who I really should have met by now as he’s into all the same things I am, but comes at them from a Microsoft technologies angle. He was even at Web Directions South last year! Go read his post on Location Awareness to see why I’m very keen to see what he gets up to next!

And lastly, there were so many other amazing people that I ran into in hallways, stairwells and bars. I have a bunch of business cards, contact details and new Twitter followers, so I’ll be keeping in touch with them too.

Whole lotta love

Many people asked me why I was going to a Microsoft conference. The previous section of this article is why. There are brilliant talented friendly people in every community. Cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies and experiences can only help to push the web forward. Exposure to different ideas and techniques that are new to me can only help me.

I talked to people about my work, both at Atlassian and outside. I shared concepts about integrating with large-scale CMSes, modernising legacy codebases, and promoting the open web. I compared notes on Ruby, Rails, .NET and Java. I learned about new technologies and techniques. I saw cool prototypes and interactions. I think I even convinced a few RIA developers to go learn HTML!

Next time you have the opportunity to go to a conference, do it. Seize the experiences and make them your own. What you get out of a conference comes from what you put in. It’s not just about sitting in sessions and heckling via the backchannel. It’s about participating in every way you can.

I appreciated every second of this week. Remix sums it up nicely.

I’ve uncovered a deep dark secret individually guarded by many of the geeks in our local community. It’s only natural that children want to play, to explore, to… experiment. Sometimes as adults, we want the same things. Especially if we can bring our adult skills to bear on our childhood joys. Brothers and sisters, don’t hide your love away. Physical computing is not a sin. Although it can be a delight. Let me explain.

This morning, Dr Nic started tweeting about his urge for a ‘carputer’ of some description. After he started posting links to tiny hardware bits, I pointed him to the Ruby Arduino Development project:

RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller. It also provides a set of Rake tasks for automating the compilation and upload process.

WTF is an ‘Arduino’

Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform. You can buy them, build them, and modify them. You can hack on the code or the hardware designs and share your changes with the community.

I’ve not played with them, but after reading articles and mentions of them and other forms of physical computing (such as Sunspots, Phidgets and the like) for the last 12-18 months, I’m incredibly interested.

Not knowing a lot about it, I can’t tell you why Arduino has captured the imagination of the community than I see more than the other similar products, but all I hear is Arduino. And the story was same this morning. After my next tweet mentioned Arduino, the local fans came out of the woodwork in a flurry of tweets.

It turns out that heaps of folks I know, particularly in the local Ruby community have already paid, played and procrastinated with their Arduino bits and pieces - but everyone wants to do more.

Do you need an excuse to play?

Firstly, if you’re interested in Ruby, Rails, Merb and the like, then it looks like peeps will now be bringing their Arduino gear along to Railscamp in June. I’ve added an Arduino section to the Equipment page so that you can list what you’ve got and we can collaboratively ensure we can make the most of it!

For the world outside the rosy bubble, the Australian importers of Arduino gear, Little Bird Electronics, are holding their first Australian Arduino workshop at UTS on the 31st of May.

Update! Little Bird Electronics are now offering a $20 discount to folks using the code ‘LACHSTOCK’ when buying workshop tickets. Thanks, Little Bird!

So if you’ve got a little electronic skeleton in your geek closet, unpack it and come play. It looks like you’ll be in some fantastic company!