OSSMichigan.org - Not quite a planet but a state.

So I just finished attending my first Reboot – and as many people tried to explain before hand, “it’s weird”. Not just European Conference weird with completely different crowd, most attendees speaking in a foreign language (their own, or in English which is foreign to them), varying minor variations on “what matters”, and of course dealing with wall plug adapters.

No, Reboot is weird in a different way. In attempting to learn if it was more traditional conference, or unconference, the answer was never clear and often just “yes” to the multiple choice question. Now I know why they said that, it actually makes sense. But let me hopefully be slightly more lucid.

What is Reboot?

Reboot asks for anyone to submit topics ahead of time, and these are then chosen both by a committee as well as public voting – so it’s a very open system, BarCamp-like, but these talks are then chosen with a speaker and assigned times. So then Reboot becomes more traditional conference with many “stage talks” in a face-forward audience setting. There are some side rooms that will have sessions scheduled that are discussions, but that definitely isn’t something to plan on. So the presentations are more traditional.

But then where Reboot was really surprising is the amount of the conference that happens outside of the sessions. This isn’t just a “hallway track” discussions – they are full-fledged, conference long sessions working on projects. People are dedicated to building things, gathering together information, creating, ideating, collaborating, advising – all during the conference. I’m quite sure a sizable number of Reboot attendees never go to a ’session’ but merely use the venue as a mechanism to gather together many like-minded people who are driven to do something, and leverage the brain-power and thoughts that are coming out of the sessions to act on something bigger.

I love BarCamps – they’re discussion-centric, synergistic, and connect people in networks to carry forward and achieve great things in the future. What Reboot does, by comparison, is not wait. Have an idea? Get started on it now. Or at least be very good in capturing the idea, disseminating it widely and getting it moving as quickly as possible.

Now perhaps with a little better, or at least verbose, explanation of what Reboot was like from my perspective – it also makes the name itself more meaningful. The conference is Reboot, not “Reinstall”, or “Start-over”, or “Redo”, just “Reboot”. When you Reboot something you retain some measure of the longer-term state it was in; applications are installed, configurations are set, and so forth. But what Rebooting does is to go back to a fresh state, with the long-term memory and skills and infrastructure, and get up and running and back into business.

So the conference is about considering what’s around you, what you’ve built and have, and through the sessions, collaborations, projects, whatever, to take a fresh perspective and jumpstart on moving forward.

Action

The theme, or topic, of Reboot 11 was “Action”. Simple, single word: Action. Take action, make something happen. There is a parellel in Tim O’Reilly’s “Work on things that matter”.

The proposed reasoning behind having Reboot focus on “Action” was that we are in a global economic crisis, there are short-term issues such as disasters, corrupt governments, and long-term problems of environmental quality, health, and education. It was a push for us to work on these issues and figure out how we can help enact change.

However I found through talking with many people that had attended several Reboots that there was “nothing new”, or “revolutionary” in many of the topics and that the individual felt they already had a good grasp of what was going on in the space. It was this malais of “amazing things” that made me realize why it’s really time to take action – and Bruce Sterling to cast just enough “Gothic Hi-Tech” to make it solidify”"

We have the tools, we have the power

The tools we’re all using and building with have been in active use for several years now. We have our wikis, blogs, social networks, mobile devices, media devices, connectivity, realtime communications, hardware interfaces, API’s, and more. We have all created an amazing toolset that has been used to create many varied, and some quite crazy, applications, worlds, communities, or systems.

And if we have these mature tools, with many choices and the ability to quickly pull them together to accomplish nearly everything – we have to grow up and realize that these are not just toys or hacks nymore. These are the very tools that can, and are already, making the world of the future.

And we, the technologists, designers, thinkers, citizens of the next generation that are now in control. We have grown up with these tools, and in many ways we’re already using them to change governments, raise communities, run businesses, and live in our world.

Act now

For me, what I took away is to take responsibility and consideration for what I choose to do. Hacks and toys are fun – but as Bruce said, “if it’s not beautiful enough to show your friends, and doesn’t have a narrative attached to it, throw it away”.

Work on things that matter, and make them work by focusing on them like they matter. Your actions will make a difference, and if they don’t – you’re doing it wrong. Put it down, and move onto something else. Collaborate and work together to achieve great, actionable outcomes. You’re an amazing person with many talents, and we can all use amazing people like you. What action are you going to evoke?

Eric Gunnerson has a post in which he responds to Justin Etheredge regarding “Is Programming A Generic Skill?”

I’ll just say that I agree with them both. There are differences between ability, proficiency and mastery.

A Java programmer can jump into C# and be an able C# programmer immediately. It will take time to become proficient and even more time to develop mastery.

I am proof of this with python. I’ve been an able python programmer for over 10 years now(actually closer to 15), but I never spent enough time in python to call myself proficient and I’m certainly far from a master.

But the thing that Eric said which triggered me to write this is not the generic skill discussion with Justin, it is instead a remark that Eric said about Perl, “… because of TMTOWTDI”.

C# is very much becoming afflicted with There is More Than One Way To Do It. It certainly is both the language and library.

Consider LINQ. LINQ to Objects is a new way to do something which everyone has done differently in the past. When new programmers are exposed to linq, I often hear the question “When do I use linq?” The answer I give is typically “whenever you would use a for loop or foreach loop and if you can’t, figure out how you can".

If we throw away the ‘idiomatic code” to which Eric refers, then a giant bucket of TMTOWTDI is thrown in our face. Do we use properties or fields, events or delegate fields?

For public interfaces, FxCop helps a great deal with guidelines for these things and helping to learn the idioms of the language and framework, but for other things, you are left to yourself. That is why reading others source code is so important. (see the weekly course code)

Expand into libraries and TMTOWTDI explodes. From MSFT alone there is Remoting, Web Services (asmx), WSE, WCF, RIA Services, ASHX, ASP.NET Data Services, all of which have some overlap. Then for data access there is ADO.NET, Linq2Sql, Entity Framework. Even within ADO.NET alone, TMTOWTDI. Do you use a reader? Table Adapter with DataSets? Strongly Typed DataSets?

Open to non MSFT and TMTOWTDI explodes again, to the point where I won’t bother listing anything. There is too much.

I think that library TMTOWTDI will always exist. Even Python has SqlObject, SqlAlchemy and ORM as parts of other frameworks like Zope and Django. But language TMTOWTDI is reasonably well mitigated in Python. This is stated in a single line in PEP20 – The Zen of Python

There should be one—preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

C#, perhaps because it was not a goal and because of its C/Java/Delphi roots, has never had that. There has always been TMTOWTDI in C#.

Since the beginning (nearly) of TurboGears 2.x development we use a private index to store all our dependencies and point people to it for installation. This was nice because it helped us control our dependency tree and make sure installation of our unstable software was as easy as possible.

Since we had released a stable 2.0 version, followed by a 2.0.1 bugfix, we really were lacking a real pypi install mechanism. This is now a thing of the past! You can install a full blown TurboGears2 environment in one simple command:

easy_install tg.devtools

and this will fetch everything using normal lookups from the pypi. I hope this will help people out there.

At the same time I’d like to ask for help in that domain: If you are using TurboGears2 and find out that some dependency that needs compilation is not found in a compiled state (either on pypi or on our index), please help us:

1. By sending a compiled version of the egg to me (florent aide, you’ll find me on the mailing list easily)
2. By pointing us the missing dependency (send a mail in the turbogears or turbogears-trunk mailing list)
3. Or even better: try to become a maintainer for the specific dependency, that you know will always be missing for your architecture, and let us know about that great news. The whole open source community will become better, your karma (the real one, not the one you can admire on ohloh) will bump-up and you’ll be forever remembered on endor.

Now this leaves us with one more thing to do: finish the web site for turbogears that is currently in a poor state. If you would like to help us on the engine, please let us know in the mailing lists or via private message. If you want to help-out with content, please let us know also and we’ll be more than glad to give you an editor account and some directions to get some content online in this new website.

Cheers all,

Florent.

F.cs(334,8): error CS0539: ‘I.M’ in explicit interface declaration is not a member of interface
F.cs(20,15): error CS0535: ‘C’ does not implement interface member ‘I.M(out string)’

This is a fun example of a poor error message, and I don’t mean because I named my file F, my interface I, my method M and my class C.

Its poor because the underlying code looks like this:

interface I { bool M(out string); }

class C:I { void M(out string); }

Sure, this is obvious now what is going on, I have void, but I should have bool, but my error message doesn’t include that when it shows the type signature.  Now consider what happens when interface I is in an assembly which is given to me. I do not have its source, and there is no documentation. My means of finding the signature of this method are three fold:

1. lean on visual studio press F12 to go to reference of the interface and VS shows me type signatures
2. use reflector
3. monodis mylibrary | grep MethodName

I usually use #1, which is probably why I’ve never seen how horrible this compiler error message is until today. Today, I used #3.

* monodis is from Mono

The number one feature that has been in Opera for longer than I can remember, and in Firefox via add-in or by default for nearly as long, is that of restoring a session when the browser or system crashes.

I lean on this feature. I use browser tabs as a todo list. Sometimes I have to-read tabs open in my browser for only minutes, and other times those to-read tabs are around for weeks and into months.

Internet Explorer was a no-go on this feature, until I noticed it today.

My laptop (I blame hardware – or poor Dell drivers) did not go to sleep when I shut the lid this evening. After a 5 mile bike ride and a 12 mile car ride home in a well insulated back pack, the laptop was frozen and pretty warm when I got home and unpacked. I had to reboot.

As soon as I logged in I remembered that I had left an Internet Explorer window open with something I wanted to read. I cursed because I thought I would have to find it and I usually struggle finding things in browser “history”.

I was surprised when I was greeted with a “restore last session” prompt from Internet Explorer.

Good job on a great feature, Internet Explorer team.

Will I be using IE as my default browser? Absolutely Not. RequestPolicy and NoScript are required browser add-ins for my daily browser usage.