DerekAllard.com : CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and the World of Web Design

Free Software and Open Source Symposium: Day One

October 25^th, 2007

First day of Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is in the books.  On the whole it was a great day (IBM talk exempted – ugh, more later).  Apparently they pronounce FSOSS as “eff-sauce”, which seems more logical then what I was saying I guess, which was basically just me repeating “eff” and “oss” over and over until the person I was chatting to got bored.

I first heard “Usability Anonymous”, presented by Jay Goldman and David Crow.  Apparently David took a job at Microsoft, as was well known, since he spent probably 5 minutes apologizing, and making sure everyone knew he used a Mac still.  They did really good job of bringing humour and insight into the topic of usable design.  I got some nice tips, and a few great resources I hadn’t known about (I’ll post those in another post).

A few interesting points… 5 of the top 10 features requests in MS Office are already in there, and have been for more then 1 version.  Users just didn’t know about it because in some cases it was buried under 11 (11!) menu options. Yikes. It did remind me of ExpressionEngine though.  The control panel interface has grown largely organically over the years, and is overwhelming until you get used to it. Really, it’s an issue of discoverability; somethings in there, but nobody knows its there.  Anyhow, great food for thought in my own work, including the ever growing menu of BambooInvoice.

Next up was a good talk from Mozilla about reviewing other people’s code.  It was good, but what I mostly took out of it was a pretty interesting discussion by Benjamin Smedberg (also of Mozilla) about a specific javascript engine review, and some fuzz-testing that happened.  Essentially, they feed the javascript engine a valid, but largely non-nonsensical chunk of js and then eval, uneval, eval, uneval and then compare the results of the 2 unevals to see if they’ve changed.  Great idea, and it actually may explain something I’ve seen in my own work recently (a situation where IE may not be unevaling something correctly). 

Next, another Mozilla presentation.  Mike Beltzner.  Nice guy.  Funny. Charismatic but scattered. He reminds me of me after I went off coffee cold turkey, and then went back on.  In a total act of injustice to his discussion, I’ll summarize it with 3 of “summary points”.  (1) Listen to your community; (2) Lead your community; (3) Let your community play and experiment.  Good advice.

I was ready for a break with lunch, and afterwards my notes got a lot more scattered.  Sorry.  A few interesting random points.  SourceForge has 90 servers, and does 647 TB of monthly traffic.  They use a MySQL database to log connections, and then pass the connections to Postgresql if it passes a few heuristics that gauge if they are under a DOS attack.

Then I (sadly) ended on a talk by IBM, which felt more like I was in a time-share presentation. They are pushing (at an Open Source conference) an agile development methodology they’ve dubbed “Open Commercial Development”.  Where does the “open” come in you ask?  Well, I’ve opted not to include my notes here as I don’t want to appear overly critical, suffice to say I think they should reconsider the use of the word “open”.  My favourite quote “open could mean a lot of things… I don’t think they realized that people might associate it with open-source”.

Ended with a keynote by Bob Young, founder of RedHat. Now that man has personality.  Great speaker, infectious attitudes, and all in all, an inspiring man, who appropriately bashed Microsoft to endear himself to the crowd ;)

This entry was made on October 25^th, 2007 @ 21:03 and filed into Noteworthy.