the written word remains

I thought I'd write some words about RailsConf Europe here. I'll do that now but there's one more important thing I want to tell people here apart from just giving an overview of the conference.

Speaking about RailsConf. There were a lot of interesting technical talks there covering present and future trends in Rails development. I especially liked the new movement towards REST and new developments on ActiveResource RESTful ruby client library which would make interaction between web resource (service) and clients a lot more straightforward than in usual SOAP/XMLRPC case. I even wrote a simple C++ library to do the same thing ActiveResource does. Also interesting was Thomas Fuchs' presentation about javascript testing framework (which supports Konqueror among other browsers btw). There were more cool talks but this blog article is not really about them.

We had two "political" talks at RailsConf both telling us that Rails is cool, Rails is great, Rails is fast, whatsoever. We were also told that any information about Rails' weakness, slowness is just plain FUD. For people not involved in Rails community I'll give several links.

Here and here Joel Spolsky says that Ruby and Rails are slow. This and this are the replies from David Hanssen.

You say, ok, this is just another "language war".

Yesterday I discovered another battlefield. Steve Yegge tries to say that Agile software development can be bad and Agile is basically egomania and religion.

You say, ok, this is not a language but rather methodology war.

But there's a common pattern between those political RailsConf talks, language and methodology wars. In those cases people are presenting things as the fight between Good vs Evil, Right Thing vs Wrong Thing, etc. And when people in both camps do that we have this ridiculous situation when thing "A" can be "Good" and "Evil" at the same time! And more importantly, if we listen to them we naturally hear that things can only be White or Black, there's nothing in between.

So Agile methodology can be "the only true way" if we listen to agilists or "egomania" if we listen to their counterpart. Now I want to ask you, people, is it really so? Is thing "A" doomed to be either White or Black? I really doubt that. "A" can work (or be good) for one group of people, can be bad for another and (sic!) there's a third group of people that don't care of "A" at all.

So there are always situations when you either like something or dislike or don't care. And that doesn't automatically make "something" Good or Evil. Simply put, there're people who want you to think of White vs Black, Good vs Evil and they usually have good reasons to do so (like to get you or your money). Most importantly their reasons and goals may not coincide with yours. Therefore I developed a habit of recognizing this pattern and analyzing all kind of information that comes in that "White vs Black" shell to assure I have my own opinion and make my own decisions and achieve my own results.

Certainly not all people have "Black or White" vision. When it comes for software development methodologies I always remember Barry Boehm and Richard Turner's "Balancing Agility and Discipline" book which is the good example of how can we extract the best thing from all methodologies by avoiding polar "White vs Black".

Same applies for programming languages. Instead of fighting the wars we'd better benefit from all the languages. And here I must admit I'm really sad to see the proposal to choose the only one scrtipting language for KDE. Do you recognize the pattern of "White vs Black" here? I do...

Finally I found the bravery to get Hofstadter's GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach) book from the shelf and start reading it. To this moment I've only read an introduction and suddenly realized that those strange loops and self-references that the author thinks of as the core to understand the consciousness and "I-ness" of a human being feel so familiar for me. I've been teaching AI for two years and I always stress the self-reflection as the only one important thing that differentiates humans from (for example) computer programs (in their current stage). Good to know you're not alone in your thoughts (and you're not the first one ;)). Now I got really interested in reading the book till the very end :)

A lot of water flew away since I promised to blog about RailsConf Europe 2006. And one major event started and finished also during that time - the aKademy conference. So during one September I managed to attend two software conferences which I haven't covered in my blog yet.

So here comes by aKademy report.

Everybody who blogs about aKademy agrees that aKademy was a great event and everybody thanks to Marcus and the guys in blue. All I can do is just add my personal thanks to all aKademy team who did a great job and were really supportive when I was bugging with my usual give-me-my-visa-paper requests!

As usual at aKademies, I didn't code much but rather spent a lot of time communicating with people. What's important is that this time we (as in KDevelop team) managed to solve (or at least discuss) quite a lot of problems that bothered us for ages. One of the most important issue was the UI design for which we have now more-or-less clear vision and even the prototype I wrote in Ruby in a couple of minutes. Once I'll find time to transfer the vision to paper (or rather email) it will appear at kdevelop-devel mailing list for discussion. All I can say now is that it seems we found rather cool compromise between UI simplicity and feature-full bloatness. What we did is basically we tried to find an intersection between ideas behind MacOSX's Finder and XCode, Eclipse's perspectives and splitted-tab layouts, KDevelop's Ideal toolviews. Such an intersection while not being radically innovative (like ZUI, for example) will hopefully give us a powerfull UI that no IDE has.

Of course, UI ideas were not the only thing we produced at aKademy. kdevelop-pg parser generator has been pushed to its full extent because Jakob started to (re)implement c++ parser with it. Adam put a lot of work to solidify the our code models stuff, and also I started to write a new model-based filemanager (already in trunk). Lot of other things happened too which I can't remember right now (probably because I spent many nights partying in Irish pubs;)).

Another thing we decided upon is that we're going to have a KDevelop conference/hacking session next year. We had it back in 2005 but missed this year and we certainly don't want to miss another year. So during KDevelop BoF it was decided to try organizing such event in mid-summer 2007. At this time we know of two possible candidates for the location. One is Boston, USA and another is the south cost of Crimea, Ukraine. In both cases we'd need some sponsorship so if you know how we can get it I'd much like to hear about that.

After aKademy I spent three days travelling the Ireland. I visited Killarney and made my way through The Ring of Kerry, I was in Cork and saw the Blarney Castle and I spent a day in Galway and Aran Islands. I got too many impressions to describe all them here. What I can say is that Ireland is certainly one of the best places of the world I ever visited.