The trip to Øredev is a long one, but worth it. This year, the Øredev conference proposed a theme celebrating the arts and technology. I wasn't sure what to expect heading toward Sweden, but I arrived tired yet open-minded. The first activity of the week was sleep, an attempt to catch up on a few hours of shut-eye after 14 hours of travel and a 7-hour timeshift. On the night of arrival, the first conference-organized activity I participated in was a Swedish cultural event involving sauna, the cold Baltic, and Swedish hospitality. The event took place at Kallbadhuset, a sauna/restaurant situated on a pier over the Baltic sea.
It was a cold and rainy night. When we arrived at the restaurant by bus, the rain and wind made the pre-sauna beer go down very nicely. There were a men's and a women's saunas, and the size of the group that showed up for the event that night was larger than they'd anticipated. They ran out of towels and I went to the sauna armed only with two sheets of paper towel to separate me from the baked cedar inside the sauna room. And it was hot in there. I stayed until I'd worked up a massive sweat and then headed out into the cold night to race down the long pier, the end of which descended into the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. The transition from the hot sauna to the icy waters of the Baltic was stark. The immersion into that water brought out my barbaric yawp. I stayed in the water for nearly a minute, then rushed back across the pier to jump into the hot sauna for another round. The second dip in the Baltic wasn't as satisfying as the first and I declared the experience to be over for me.
After showering and dressing, I remember the open-air walk back to the restaurant from the sauna area being much more pleasant than what I'd experienced in the long, wet walk from the bus that brought us to the restaurant. The transitions from extreme heat to extreme cold had conditioned my body to find the center and be at peace with the conditions of the night.
They served a lovely meal and the conversations at the all the tables in the restaurant were lively. The experience of sitting naked in the sauna and testing our mettle in the cold waters had exposed a bit of the shared humanity that the conference was embracing with its arts theme. That night was a celebration of the feelings and the extremes our bodies are capable of withstanding. Connecting with that and each other is what the arts often enable, and, what I suspect the conference hoped we would experience.
The first keynote of the conference was given by Anna B. Scott (@doctoradancer). Anna is a dance professor who told a very poignant story about how a brain injury changed her life and robbed her of her mobility for a while. She described how technology came to the rescue to keep her connected to humanity, how she discovered a community of people whom she connected with despite not being able to move around very much. This story she told, about interface of the physical and the technological was delivered partly as a talk and partly through interpretive dance. Anna said that the arts are expressions of our humanity; they are what lead us out of the forests that we hide in. It was a gripping performance that set the tone for the conference: how do the people we are relate to each other via ideas and technology? What changes in how we can relate when our communication shifts from face-to-face interaction to words streaming across screens in front of us? Does technology disrupt us or do we disrupt each other by our use of technology? She was a brilliant choice as the opening keynote of the conference. I got a chance to speak to her afterwards and pass on how much her talk grabbed me.
There were many other talks at the conference that I found memorable. One was given by Douglas Crockford on RQ, a library for writing functional JavaScript that includes "monads, promises, and various flavors of FRP". Crockford said that event-based systems are inside-out inversion of control models, versus procedural architectures which are systems of dominoes. He also mentioned a JavaScript port of QuickCheck that he wrote called (JSCheck). I can't help but look at Crockford's disapproving avatar from his github page and assume that I am doing it wrong.
I saw a presentation on Scala and the Play framework by James Ward. What I saw made me think that Play still had a way to go before it would as enjoyable to write web applications in compared to Rails.
There was a presentation by Thomas Q. Brady about how great design pushes developers to connect users to a moment and to each other through technology. He recommended the movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, as a source of inspiration for pursuing mastery in the art form that is your calling.
Angela Harms gave a very personal talk on pairing and mindfulness. About showing up with your whole self and being present with your pair while thinking through a problem. Also about being open to ideas that you may not agree with for the purposes of exploration. She told a great story about pairing with someone and agreeing to go down a path she thought was wrong only to learn that it turned out to work. That sticking with your pair and being open to an alternative approach (even one that was counter to where you should be going) could lead to learning both for you and your pair. I really liked this idea.
Steve Klabnik gave a tour of through the history of Rails. How an environment that gave @dhh the freedom to create a framework that innovated away from practices that no one else was questioning. The time was right for a new way of organizing and writing web applications. In the last few years, the landscape has changed yet again. Rails is still alive but JavaScript has seen a massive resurgence and in the client and server space. Steve acknowledged this trend and made a point of saying that Rails makes a great API server for JavaScript web applications.
The talk that generated the most notes in my notebook was given by Fred George on Implementing Micro Service Architectures. Micro service architectures are systems where requestors and responders are completely decoupled and communicate via event messaging. The services that respond to event "requests" (though the events may be requests or they may just represent data known about something) are small (hence the 'micro' component of the architecture) and are meant to be replaceable/disposable at any time by some "better" form of the same or a similar service. Fred described a rule-of-thumb of no more than 100 lines per service. He also said that one of the benefits of this architecture is that it allowed rapid deployment and feedback about the efficacy of any service. As well, in adopting this architecture, his teams had abandoned the normal TDD (or unit testing in general) of the services themselves. That instead of writing automated tests for services that may be thrown away at any time, service monitoring became the means of bug/design feedback. In the talk, he didn't go into much detail about the monitoring and what (other than that a service was up and responding to events) was being monitored. There were many interesting ideas from this talk, lots more than what I've mentioned here. I recommend watching the talk and perhaps reaching out to Fred with questions. I asked several from the audience.
The coolest talk I saw was a live-coding demonstration by Bodil Stokke, wherein she created a CRUD site in Clojure for managing MLP-related data. Aside from being fantastically impressed by the coding feat, I took from the demo that Clojure a DSL for creating MLP websites.
I had the greatest meal of my life on this trip. It was at a curiously named restaurant called Bastard. It was a 5-course meal that consisted of meats, baked vegetables, fish, pickled spicy things, and perfectly paired wines. I don't remember what the dessert was because by then I was in a food coma. At several points in the evening, I had to cover my eyes and disengage from the dinner conversation because I was utterly overwhelmed by the experience the food was creating in my mouth and I just had to focus on that. The meal was crazy expensive. And worth it. If the conference was a celebration of the arts and technology, and the arts reflect our humanity, Bastard grabbed hold of my humanity from the inside of my mouth and reminded me how good it is to be alive.
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