PDX Rocks

It's sad to realize how many airports either have inadequate WiFi, or make you pay for it. I was in LAX, and it wasn't obvious whether there was WiFi at all. I mean, LA! Of all places! San Jose was better, but I recall you had to pay. Chicago's the same. Everyone wants to make a buck on WiFi. Portland, as a whole, is relatively decent when it comes to connectedness, though apparently, the US is a far cry short of countries like Japan.

I'm sitting in at Portland airport which gets the designation of PDX at a Booya juice. I get all sorts of fascinating facts about Portland from various people who were originally from the Maryland-Virginia area. From Chadd and Laura, I find Portlanders like their beer and wine. I had two or three kinds of local beer, plus Fat Tire which, I believe, is more of a Washington beer, in addition to Mirror Pond, a local brew.

From Jim and Paul, the two guys I met from Virginia doing Rails stuff, I learned Portland has the highest per capita homeless teens, as well as the highest density of strip clubs. Ah Portland.

I should fancy meeting people that have come cross country like myself. I met with Amy Hoy, who gave a talk about designers and developers. She happens to be from Maryland. Even Greenbelt, which is 10-15 minutes from where I live.

Then, there are several North Carolina boys, from folks like Justin Gehtland, Jared Richardson, Nathan Talbott, and Matthew Bass. Makes you think they should host some more things in North Carolina (they are hosting Rubyconf in November, so that sounds good).

Hmm, I guess I'll review the third day. This is like my American Idol review except I don't review American Idol. First, I listened to Britt Selvitelle and Alex Payne on Scaling Twitter. One of the two guys really couldn't get his microphone to work properly. He really should have stood over the mike the entire time. I know the temptation is to walk around, but it didn't work. Worse still, the pronunciation wasn't so good either.

The talk was surprisingly lacking in content (I thought), but oddly enough, that made it a little easier to follow. Most of the time was spent in a Q&A. On the other hand, I didn't know that much about Mongrel or memcache, so the details they gave were a little beyond me. It's hard to get a talk that is at the right level. Oh, did I mention? They used cats in their slides.

I went to Amy Hoy's talk. She's a designer who's picked up some development. Did she have cats in her talk? She might have. It's the in-thing, which means it's on the way out.

Her talk was pretty good. She mostly laid out ground rules between developers and designers. By designers, she is referring to interaction designers such as herself. There appears to be a dearth of such designers around partly because you need to be decent in art and be technical enough to know coding, such as CSS, HTML, and even something a little more hardcore like a little Ruby or Java. Designers who do web stuff tend to be on the geeky end. Although I can't say I learned that much about design, it did shed some light on how one should work with them. And you can't say she's boring.

Since I was on a roll with women speakers, I was hoping that Andrea O.K. Wright would have a pretty good talk. A.O.K. seems a bit frazzled. Well, her hair did. And she seemed a bit cold. Mostly, because she was wearing a large coat. You know, this is one case where I think maybe if she had a better presentation voice, things would have been better. Again, mike issues. She didn't sound particularly loud, nor particularly into her talk. You get a guy like Adam Keys, whose voice can be deadpan at times, but says funny stuff nonetheless.

Wright appeared to be balanced between reviewing easier things and hitting something a little more challenging. She did try to use Harry Potter to make things more exciting. But it would help if she sounded a bit more into it.

Like I said, I'm trying to conduct this review much like those people who review American Idol on YouTube, where they say how ugly this dress is, how hideous the hair was, and so forth. At least, I'm not being that mean.

Ultimately, good speaking involves not only good subject matter, but a good presenting style. And it is a kind of acting, so the idea isn't quite to be yourself, but to be a better version of yourself, or the thespian version of yourself. Channel Dave Thomas and do good!

Ah, Dave Thomas. Please Dave Thomas, enough with the t-shirts and jeans. They don't flatter you! But Dave is a great speaker anyway. He's realized a useful commodity. Don't lose the British accent. Don't sound like the Texan you could be.

Second, good speeches involve a little bit of suspense and twists, and my if Dave Thomas isn't quick on his feet. He was talking about having a problem with his wardrobe or some such related to a microphone. Dave is such a pro that he knows when his voice isn't projecting as loud as it should. He had mike problems early, but corrected it, so it wasn't the distraction it was like the Twitter guys or Andrea Wright. I was thinking about the infamous wardrobe malfunction of one Janet Jackson. And that was where Dave Thomas was thinking too. He said "I'm glad I'm not Janet Jackson!". Those clever Brits!

I had heard Dave Thomas's presentation on cargo cult before. A great speaker makes speeches you've heard before still sound great. To be fair, Dave can change up some of the talk picking different cargo cults. Dave also is smart. He pays attention to speakers like Ze Frank, and takes down useful quotes, and spins them into talks. There's a savviness to observe others and use what they say in your talk. For one, it effectively summarizes the conference. If you had been to the keynotes, you say, ah, that is right, that is what he said.

Dave Thomas had a picture of some guy sitting in front of some ancient IBM (the 3270?). He asked the audience what he was sitting in front of. Someone yelled "A desk!". He goes "A desk! That's why we shouldn't invite designers!".

Dave also mentioned how much money was raised (26,000 dollars) and wanted people to continue to raise money at other conferences. He did say that he felt like an NPR begathon. As a guy who listens to a fair bit of NPR (or used to), I know what that's like. At 26,000, the average person would have donated 10 to 15 dollars, which, of course, meant, probably half the people chose not to shell out the bucks (for the record, I did give 75 dollars). On the one hand, I thought it was a bit of a steep donation. On the other, I spent like 900 dollars on attending Railsconf to begin with (not to mention flights, car rental, and hotel costs--adds up!).

Afterwards, people gathered outside to talk. I saw Chad Fowler. One thing is, he's a tall guy! I ended up talking more to his wife than to Chad. We discussed stuff about India.

I also saw Evan Weaver. He's tall and wiry thin. The guy doesn't appear more than 140 pounds. He's also a bit on the quiet side, and so it was a little difficult trying to talk to him, so I ended up not talking to him. I saw Adam Keys (the real one), but didn't say anything to him. Matt Bass was sitting at a couch punching away at the computer. I saw the Rails Envy guy who do a version of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" that opened up each of the keynotes. They did a pretty good rendition, even if both guys look spectacularly geeky.

I'm sure I missed out on several of the other folks who spoke. I saw the African fella who was in the documents BOF. He seemed to be around a bit. I saw the guy who I sat with for breakfast the first day. He was into some hardware verification or some such. I bumped into John Guerin, the transplanted Portlander. He had his UVA shirt, and it seemed he's actually much closer to my age than not. That was surprising since he seemed like he was 15. As I said earlier, I met up with Jim and Paul again. Jim was the guy I paired programmed with during Dave and Aslak's TDD talk. I didn't see them really on Saturday (and I was looking around!). As it turned out, Jim saw me this morning, then I saw him again after Dave's talk.

Well, that wrapped up Railsconf. It was raining outside, so I stayed in, looking completely lost.

Eventually, I headed to the hotel. I wanted to eat at an Ethiopian place which was allegedly about a mile from the convention center. It turned out it was even closer to the hotel, so I walked several blocks to Queen of Sheba. It wasn't quite like what I had had at other DC area Ethiopian places. The chicken seemed liked stir-fry with mushrooms and Ethiopian spices. At least, it was spicy hot, which I liked. I also had mustard greens. It didn't seem prepared like I had tasted before, tasting more like, well, regular mustard greens.

As usual, I stuffed myself while drinking two Oregonian beers. Then, I decided to walk back to the Convention Center to see if anyone was still there, but by then, which was nealry 7, the place was locked. I headed back to the airport, got directions to the airport, dropped the rental (dadgum, there was no gas station nearby, so I had to go in un-refueled, and pay like 20 bucks for it).

And that's where I am now, sitting by Booya juice, with my juice done. More than likely, I'll get some coffee, and wait a bit.

I'll give my impressions of the entire conference, good and bad afterwards. Realize that I'm giving an opinion from a guy who barely knows Ruby on Rails. However, the last few days, I've heard enough keywords to help me look forward to getting stuff to work.