Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Day 2 of the conference was a huge improvement over day 1. I was able to pick a set of sessions that were useful rather than just interesting. Technical glitches caused problems, but there was less amateurism on display.A session by Adobe’s Ted Patrick on Flex worst practices got the day off to a good start. Ted’s speech was more about how to avoid bad practices rather than a ‘train wreck’ list of them. Test driven development with ASUnit got a mention as a way of avoiding many problems, along with agile practices (no mention of scrum though) and the use of subversion. All of it was preaching to the converted from my point of view, but great to hear.

The next session was the low point of the day. Dave Yang was covering mobile devices. He arrived late and the technicians couldn’t get various devices to work with the projector. So we had a short session involving lots of shaky camera-pointed-at-device type demos. A shame as this is an important area for me.

Aral Balkan was up next with his SWX talk. This was a classic piece of tempting fate. At the start of his speech he touched upon how he had moved away from unreliable Windows to his lovely reliable Mac. Later in his speach his lovely reliable Mac had to be rebooted as it refused to connect to the wireless network. Let’s just say it made me smile.


The end of the day was wrapped up with a stunning set of OpenGL particle processing animations by Robert Hodgin. All in all a good day.

The reality of the 5th struck me halfway through the afternoon: the car park at Lewes station shuts at 5pm and day 1 of the conference shuts at 5pm too. I contemplated possible quantum solutions, but to no avail. Luckily the Flash on the Beach organisers came to my rescue. The 4-5pm session on Tuesday, by Joshua Davis hadn’t looked very interesting, so John Davey kindly swapped it with the Monday one, and so I was able to leave early without missing anything important to me. Not sure how the organisers knew I needed them swapped, but thanks anyway.

One of the the two sessions I attended in the afternoon was Carole Guevin’s session on Self Promotion, which was OK, but nothing exciting. The other was a very impressive speaker, Hoss Gifford, singing his own praises. He ran through a bunch of projects that he had been involved with. and went into what had gone on behind the scenes. Neither was particularly informative to a software developer, but both were thought provoking.

I’ll end this post with a thought for you: do you know everything? If not then you ignorant. This of course means we are all ignorant, so why does the word carry so much negative baggage?

It is lunchtime on day 1 of the Flash on the Beach event in Brighton and my main thought so far is ”what sort of two bit conference is this? They don’t even provide lunch!” Poor quality organisation aside, so far it has been reasonably good.

The keynote was better than I expected. It was very amateur in execution but it contained some interesting bits and pieces about AIR and CS4.

The first session I attended was by Dave Williamson. It was on the subject of localisation. It was a frustrating session, for the subject is an important one and Dave raised some interesting ideas that had not occurred to me. But it needed lots of examples and there were very few and what was there were badly done.

The other session of the morning was an introduction to AIR. This was by Mike Chambers, a product manager for Adobe. This was both professionally presented and informative.

And so we get to the ”no food” lunchtime and half of day 1 is done.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Lewes is the place to be on the evening of 5th November. Why? Perhaps more importantly, why should Flash on the Beach attendees care? Well the 5th of November in bonfire night, which many parts of Britain celebrate with firework displays, and the biggest, most spectacular celebration of this night arguably occurs just 12 minutes train journey away from Brighton in my home town of Lewes.

You can read more about it here and here and here.

If you choose to come, here are some useful tips:

1. Make sure you have a map (I’d suggest both this one and this one). Lewes is an old town with narrow twisty streets and you can get completely lost in no time.
2. Read through my links and make sure you know which fire site you are going to. Be aware that Cliffe is advance ticket only, so plan to visit another (I recommend Waterloo; it’s where I’m going)
3. Get there early. Processions start around 6pm and the police start closing off streets before then.
4. Get a good spot. The best point to see processions is on the High Street. Note that the top of Station Street is closed off though, so you may need to head along Landsdown Place and back up School Hill to get to it.
5. Bring your own drink. The pubs will be rammed. There are plenty of food vendors around though. Responsible consumption of alcohol on the streets is allowed. The hundreds of police that help keep the event great will soon deal with you if you aren’t responsible.
6. Around 9pm - 9:30pm, the largest parade occurs on the High Street. As the societies start to split, head off to your chosen firesite and prepare for a wait (the start times are incredibly unreliable, so get there early and expect to wait 30 minutes or more, otherwise you might miss it).
7. As soon as the firework display is over, head straight back to the station. The station gets incredibly busy toward the end of the night, but if you are quick, you can avoid a lot of the queues.
8. The last advertised train back to Brighton is around midnight. The queues can be more than an hour long. In the past, the trains have just kept running though until the queues are gone though. However, I can offer no assurance that this will happen this year.

Here’s a story to put a smile on the face of any Apple fan: according to PC World in the US, the fastest Windows laptop they have ever reviewed was the Apple MacBook Pro!

Full story at PC World.