OSCON 2014 Reflections

I’m sitting in Portland International Airport waiting for the chariot that will return me to Vancouver, so I thought I’d pass the time by reflecting on my experience at OSCON. I am not generally the kind of guy that gets the fullest experience out of a conference. I attend the talks, maybe meet a few people, and return to my hotel room to watch some Netflix. But even a social caterpillar like me has fun at these things. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the talks that I attended. I learned a lot from the tutorials, and I found the keynotes engaging.

Three talks particularly stood out to me, for various reasons:

Using D3 for Data Visualizations

The first tutorial that I attended (on Sunday), was led by Josh Marinacci on the topic of HTML5 Canvas, SVG, and D3 for data visualization. It was based on his onine book HTML Canvas Deep Dive. I found the teaching style well structured and engaging. I picked up a few tips on style that I adopted for my tutorial which I gave the following day.

It is amazing how far Javascript has come. D3 has brought data visualization to the point where every researcher (i.e. people who are producing data) should at least try to learn it. I have recommended it to my wife, who has only taken one programming course in her life and does not program on a regular basis. She will be my guinea pig to see if it’s easy enough for non-devs to pick up.

Here are the results of three exercises in the tutorial:

  1. Agricultural Productivity By State
  2. Bar Chart Using Canvas
    • A bar chart drawn with HTML5 Canvas
  3. Pie Chart
    • A Pie Chart drawn using SVG

OpenUI5

I attended a talk by some of the OpenUI5 team. OpenUI5 is an HTML5 framework developed by SAP for cross-platform/mobile development. It provides a large number of widgets and development tools that you can use for developing a cross-platform app. And the only dependency it has is a single Javascript file.

The things that I like about it are:

  1. Light-weight. Single JS include.
  2. Really nice looking controls and layouts.
  3. Apache License
  4. Backed by a big company (so it has a better chance of survival than some of the other little promising HTML UI kits out there).

More about this talk

AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor

I attended a talk by Dan Allen on JRuby where he demonstrated some cool aspects of the language, compared its performance with MRI (the canonical Ruby) and shows some tips on making Ruby and Java work nicely together. Dan is one of the developers behind AsciiDoc which, until OSCON, I hadn’t been aware of. Asciidoc looks like an excellent tool for developing documentation and writing books. I have experimented with lots of solutions over the past several years in this space, including (but not limited to) Doxygen, TeX, DocBook, JSDoc, PHPDocumentor, restructured text, and, more recently, Markdown.

I will definitely be giving Asciidoc a go as it appears to provide the simplicity of Markdown with the power of DocBook. The fact that it is a format that is supported by O’Reilly for their authors, lends weight to its viability for arbitrary documentation projects.

Mirah

OK, there weren’t any talks on Mirah per-se, but the JRuby talk that I mentioned above reminded me of my unfinished netbeans module for Mirah. I ended up spending most of my evening hours of OSCON getting the Mirah module ready for release.

I fell in love with Mirah at first sight. It deserves a lot more attention than it is getting. Hopefully the Netbeans module will convince a Java developer or two to take a look. At the very least, it will enable me to start writing code in Mirah that I would otherwise write in Java. And nobody will be the wiser 🙂

My plans for Mirah center around Codename One. It is uniquely positioned to provide an alternate language for developing Codename One applications. I plan to use its macro ability to provide a sort of DSL specifically for removing the ceremony and boiler plate (inherent in Java) surrounding all of the common functions. I think I can improve productivity on CN1 apps by at least a factor of 2, and perhaps even more.

I’ll be posting more on that later.

Some Keynotes that You Should Watch

Andrew Sorensen : The Concert Programmer

This was really amazing to watch. This guy uses a special programming language to compose and sequence music. He codes up a pretty cool song right in front of your eyes.

Simon Wardley : Introduction to Value Chain Mapping

Simon demonstrates a really cool method to visually analyze and depict the value-chain in a company. I’m not really a management guy, but this technique looks like it could be applied to quite a few things. Watch it. You’ll learn something.

My Own Talk

Oh yeah. I led a tutorial on Codename One also. I’ll talk more about that in a separate post.

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