PDC 2008 Wrap-up

As usual, PDC 2008 was a great event. I had a chance to meet a lot of old friends (it’s been 7 years since I’ve been to a PDC- it attracts a certain crowd that only shows up there) and I’m happy to see that everyone’s doing well.

My IronRuby talk was the first day of the conference. It was a crazy mixture of many, many demos (9 in all) which showed:

- when and why you should create a new type in IronRuby using C#

- how to write a Visual Studio plug-in using Ruby

- how to build a unit test and mock object framework

- how to integrate Ruby scripting into your existing C# application

- how to build simple web services using Sinatra

Only one blew up (the last one) when I forgot to change the type name in my ironruby_mischief.rb file to the type that I created in the IronRuby libraries.

You can watch it on TV now (Silverlight required).

Brief Rant:

Session evaluations are a great way to give direct feedback to the teams. Sure, you can send email to the speakers directly, but session evaluations get circulated fairly broadly internally and are often used by management for future product plans. They are a great way for you to influence the way we plan and prioritize the work that we need to do.

But there’s really not a lot in it for you, the attendee, outside of maybe some personal satisfaction that you helped to influence the products that you use (that’s if you knew how influential they can be in the first place).

Here’s my proposal:give direct incentives for folks to fill out their evaluations. It can be something as simple as 1 eval == 1 ticket for a drawing for prizes at the end of the conference. The more evals you submit, the greater your chances for winning prizes that are donated by the sponsors.

You could do things like what Stack Overflow does: give merit badges to folks that provide quality feedback. Written comments are always preferable to just clicking on radio buttons, so you could earn more merit points by doing just that. The whole system is online anyway, and it wouldn’t be that hard to implement.

You could even do something simple like write 5 evaluations to get your conference T-shirt. That should significantly improve the response rate, considering what the awesome power of T-shirts are in the geek world :)

I don’t believe that this would skew the feedback in a significant way. Hopefully we’ll hear more from the ‘silent majority’ this way. For example, I had 245 people in my IronRuby talk and as of this writing, I only have 15(!) evaluations.

If you read this far (and you attended my talk at PDC) please click here to submit your evaluation. Apparently that link is some kind of one-time link. You'll (unfortunately) have to go to the PDC site and navigate to my session (TL44).

What I liked:

I loved the Big Room. It was a place where folks could gather to meet and mingle. Since I want to talk to customers at the show, I was happy to spend virtually all of my time in the Big Room talking to customers.

But there was one talk that I did attend: Miguel de Icaza’s awesome Mono and .NET talk. Horrible title – it really should be called “Awesome Mono hacks by Miguel and his band of merry hackers”.

Here’s the coolest thing that he showed:

Mono applications running on a non-jailbroken iPhone. Yes, you heard that right. For those of you who aren’t in the know about these things, the iPhone SDK prevents you from writing a JIT compiler through some kernel restrictions (you can’t mark a writable page as executable). It also prohibits you from writing an interpreter so that they can maintain their lock on application distribution via the App Store. So how did they do it? They made it possible to compile an entire Mono application into a single binary executable which gets signed via xCode and downloaded to the phone. This opens up some pretty awesome opportunities for using .NET as a platform for building apps that run on the iPhone.

He also showed a very cool C# REPL in action. There are some cool UI ideas from his REPL that are going to find a nice home in the IronRuby REPL :)

Lots of fun banter during the talk as well. Click here to watch it on TV (video not there right now at the time of this writing, but should be there soon).

I had a chance to meet a lot of folks, and once my talk was done, I decided to try and shoot photos of as many of my friends as I could. I’ll continue to upload them to my PDC 2008 flickr photoset as I process them on my laptop.

More later as I continue to collect my thoughts.

Comments

[Chris Hardy]

I was thinking about the evaluations and how a lot of people who didn't make it there (and all the NotAtPDC people) would probably want to have there say about the sessions they watched online. It's the same session at the end of the day and potentially many more people than 245 or 15 to give feedback to the internal team. I'll probably end up blogging about some of the sessions I enjoyed but it's easier to be more honest if it's anonymous :)

For the record I downloaded and watched your IronRuby talk and enjoyed it. Excited about the VS integration the most but can't help but think that some people in the crowd might have got a lost quite quickly if they haven't had at least a brief look at Ruby already.

[Stefano]

Awesome presentation, John. I watched it yesterday on Channel9 and I enjoyed (just like all your other presentations at the various PDCs). One question: the WEBRick hosting Sinatra was running on IronRuby or on CRuby?
Also, if you happen to know, what happened to the Sinatra project webpage? Where can I download a copy from? Thank you and congratulations!

[Ryan Riley]

I also enjoyed watching your presentation from the comforts of Channel9. I think the best take-away for me was having something to show some of my coworkers as a reason they might consider a language like Ruby. The unit testing and mocking demo was especially impressive.

Thanks!

[John Lam]

@Chris: Totally agree about the external evaluations. I'm making this feedback through internal channels as well, so I'll make sure to add that to it. The feedback that we get from the actual conference evals is also anonymous, so I would imagine that it would be simple for the conference organizers to set up.

@Stefano: We're running WEBrick on IronRuby. I want to write a Rack adapter for one of our managed web servers (eg Chiron or Cassini). Ideally IIS, but not sure if the API supports the right semantics for that.

@Ryan: I'm going to spend some time packaging the demos up from here at PDC and next week at RubyConf and I'll post them up to our wiki when they're done.

[Josh]

The big problem with the session feedback is for non attendees.

More people will watch the videos online then actually attended the talk. Seems to me you should open up the evaluations to anyone with a live id. You could then divy nonattendees out from attendees as part of the back end if that was important.

From a speakers perspective I sure you believe the person who watches from the comfort of the desk at home is in the same position to provide valued feed back.

[Jason]

I attended PDC and after submitting my second eval during the conference, the website said to go to the information booth for my reward. It was one of those "I'm a PC" T-shirts.

[Scott]

I think two things really stand-out for me from Miguels talk:

1) The Microsoft "Language Mafia" crew all sitting front-row, center.

2) Brad Abrams yelling out "We LOVE Mono" after the talk.

It's a far, far cry from where Mono was 4-5 years ago in terms of acceptance by Microsoft and I think it's indicative of the changes that are occuring within Microsoft.

[John Lam]

@Josh: Totally agree with the need to get online feedback as well.

@Jason: Wow. Good to see that we're doing something already. But I guess that wasn't publicized ahead of time. And hopefully it means that we can get more than just 2 evals as well :)

@Scott: Yep. One. Step. At. A. Time.

[Gokhan]

Great bokeh on that Phil & Jeff love affair photo. Nice one :)

[Ryan]

I watched the PDC video a couple of times and now want to demo something similar with Sinatra and an internal work library. How do I duplicate your setup for PDC? I grabbed the source from RubyForge and built it using VS2008. I added the build/debug folder to my path and now when I run require 'sinatra' I get an error:

ironruby\src\IronRuby.Libraries\Builtins\Kernel
Ops.cs:400:in `require': no such file to load -- sinatra (LoadError)
from custom_require.rb:26:in `require'
from :0

[Lars]

Just watched your talk, it was good in general, I liked the many demos, much better than slides.

I was a bit put off by vim, the command line and the visual studio colors. It's a bit hard to read white on black when you are not used to it, especially in a video. Sometimes it seemed as if you were just trying to look cool. Most of the demos also was of the "cool" kind.

I would have liked to see more of how ironruby can help me in my day job of making professional products. It's also important to have a stable release when using it in a product that you sell for money, the daily builds don't work as well there.

Overall I would like to see a more professional approach, with real visual studio integration, help files etc, so that I can finally use it instead of just playing with it. (btw the link to the pdf documentation for dlr hosting is broken http://www.iunknown.com/2008/01/latest-dlr-host.html )

Finally I would like to say that I think the DLR is the most exciting thing to come out of MS for years.