SiteCrafting, Inc.

On Wednesday, I had the pleasure to attend and volunteer for the StackOverflow DevDays conference in Seattle. StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site, much like Expert's Exchange except without the nagging to register. It boasts over 1 million page views per day and something like 20 thousand active users.

There were many interesting topics covered, from ASP.NET to Qt, and there's a few new ideas that I want to try out now.


The conference started off with a keynote presentation by Joel Spolsky covering everything from business sense, to the conflict between simplicity and sales. According to Joel, more features means more sales. However, most users only use 20% of their software, so we have to find the balance between making software simple and intuitive but also offering enough features to attract a large number of users.

Also notable from this talk was "you are not in charge of what your users do" and "interrupting your users is a bad idea" (ie dialog boxes).

Scott Hanselman talked about ASP.NET MVC, as well as demoed Visual Studio 2010. There are some neat features in both the MVC and VS. However, I'm more of a Mac Guy.

Next up was Cody Lindley from Ning to talk about jQuery. He is very active in the jQuery community, as well as the original creator of Thickbox (an incredibly versatile tool for jQuery). He covered many features of jQuery, as well as the 5 Key Concepts behind jQuery.

• Find Something, Do Something, ie jQuery('p').hide();
  
• Create Something, Do Something, ie jQuery('Something
').appendTo('ul#nav');

• Chaining, ie jQuery('p').addClass('hover').css('color', 'red');
  
• Implicit Iteration - Automatically going over each item of a selection
  
• jQuery Parameters

After Cody was Daniel Rocha from Nokia to talk about Qt (pronounced 'cute'). The first part of the presentation felt like a Nokia advert, but that was because he wanted to get to the real meat of the presentation, the demo of Qt. I was very impressed by the versatility of the Qt platform. In a few minutes, he was able to code up a simple application, and build it for Windows, Linux, and a Nokia phone. Developing with one language for any of the 6 (!) platforms that Qt runs on is absolutely incredible.

Next was Ted Leung to talk about Python. Python is an incredible language, and Ted touched on only a little bit of it's power. His presentation was hampered, however, by terrible choices for font colors in his code. It's a shame, because I think that turned many people off to what he had to say.

Dan Sanderson talked about developing for Google App Engine. It's very simple to setup and get developing, and hosting sites on Google's servers means that you've got a high degree of reliability and scalability.

The final presentation of the day was from Steve Seitz from UW. He and several other people have developed a tool which is so awesome, words cannot describe it. Also, very tough programming. Check it out: grail.cs.washington.edu/rome. It's the technology behind photosynth.net.

StackOverflow is a great site, and this was a great conference. I'd suggest that all the programmers out there make sure to go next year.

Also notable (and fun) was that Amazon was there recruiting with code puzzles. They had one - how do you create a function that returns (boolean) true exactly .31416 % of the time? There were some interesting solutions (Amazon seems to like overly complicated ideas), but I think

return rand() <= round(Math.pi/10, 5)

is the best. Oh yeah, that was my solution too. ;)