Skip to main content

EdgeConf 2013 Was The Best Conference I've Ever Attended

I do not say this lightly. I have a strong emotional bond with PyCon, and I’ve run my own conference. EdgeConf was easily the most rewarding conference experience I’ve ever had the pleasure to be a part of. Capturing why it was such a great time is very important to me.

EdgeConf was a combation of validation, fascination, and exploration.

I attended EdgeConf feeling a bit apprehensive. To me, it seemed like a Big Deal full of amazing people I would feel completely out of place around. I did not expect to fit in, but to just absorb from these smart people.

What I found instead were experts on panels solving the same problems I’m solving in very similar ways, making different trade-offs. I learned how Conde Nast has been loading responsive images, something I’ve implemented and maintain, and spent considerable time at dinner comparing the approaches we’ve taken. I was able to learn about Javascript-free ways to implement our loader, with browser support trade-offs using “The Clown Car” technique. And, I think, I was able to impart a bit of our own successes in moving our image sizing out of the content and into the presentation layer.

I was absolutely fascinated by the Legacy and Payment panels, the two I thought I’d be bored by. When Manu Sporny from the W3C told us to come and get involved in defining the spec, and when questions were routinely responded to with “go write a spec for it”, I felt enormously empowered as a participant in the direction of the web.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...