College Days

College is one of those unusual environments, an experience we've never seen before, nor anything quite like it since, especially if you stayed on campus in a dorm. For one, if you stay in a campus dorm, then everyone moves at the same time, each fall. This means, unlike real life, you can better coordinate living with other people.

College life also means late nights spend studying for exams, writing papers, coding if you're a computer science major. Often, this is done with your pals, working at the libraries or some empty lecture hall. These days, with everyone having a laptop and wireless Internet on ever campus, people huddle together, tied closely to the umbilical cord that powers their laptops, and stare at the warming glow of an LCD screen.

Conferences like Railsconf approximate this feeling. We're in a large conference center, the Portland Convention Center, with its tall ceiling, its escalators, its large rooms, with large round tables situated outside with extension cords. Geeks gather close to one another like penguins in search of heat. Information exchanged.

One thing that seems to unite a great deal of the Rails developers. Apples. Most likely Macbook Pros. Few of the guys are using the cheap white Macbook like I'm using. Perhaps it's because they use it for work, and work is willing to provide them with a top-of-the-line Mac.

The problem with 1600 attendees is that it's hard to meet anyone in particular. The BOFs sometimes do a better job, especially if everyone introduces themselves. In particular, I've found there is a small group of people using Rails to do scientific work, specifically in bioinformatics. You would think this would only interest, well, no one, yet, 20 or more people showed up.

Now I have no particular interest in bioinformatics, so what was I doing there? First, I know of a professor doing work in that area. Not well, but I do know of it. Second, I didn't do half-bad in a biology course I took. OK, it was high school, but it was AP Biology. Third, I was just curious how something that seems aimed at Web development would intrigue scientific programmers. Finally, scientists have historically been bad programmers, using poor variable names and sprawling spaghetti code. Yet, here were these folks at Railsconf who should be near the top of their game (or in that vicinity).

Over time, non CS types have become far more adept at understanding the software engineering process. Furthermore, CS types have understood better how to communicate with scientists, even majoring in science, as well as having a deep interest in programming. The two fields (science and computer science) have gotten much closer together.

Issues such as scaling, database access, looking to languages like Erlang to get concurrency are sufficiently advanced topics that illustrate the know-how of the people involved.

Indeed, on the first day, I was listening to guys talk about formal hardware verification. It was all plenty impressive.

It certainly feels like a different crowd from ETECH which attracts non-programmers as well, who are interested in technology in general.

Right now, I'm seated at a wall, trying to install Rails from a book that might be six months old, and trying to figure out how to make the appropriate changes. There's one more day of this, then a flight back, and back to the "real world".

It's occasionally fun to go back to the closest thing we have to reliving college. Someone was advertising free beer at some local pub downtown. I didn't really drink in college, and while I drink a fair bit more now, I'm likely to pass on this session. Perhaps I shouldn't, but the hour is late, and there's only one more day left, so I'd rather get the sleep.

Perhaps that tells me that this is real-life and not the dream world of college.