TCCC11 - Day One

At first I was unsure about some of the presentations at #TCCC11, but the ones I went to today were actually highly relevant.

1. The first talk, Essential Database Performance for Developers brought up several ways to look at performance in SQL Server and Oracle before going to production. At the end, David Berry had a number of SQL queries you can use to summarize metrics queries in a live environment, information which might help with performance improvements. I'd like to see if I can find the Oracle equivalent of these examples as they seemed very helpful!

He also mentioned several free books from Redgate software:
• SQL Server Execution Plans by Grant Fritchey
• Mastering SQL Server Profiler by Brad M McGehee

Also, redgate makes data generation tools. I often wonder if StochUnit would help someone with data generation for testing purposes.

Still part of me is saddened, that where I work, we've done the work to find out where the indices are needed, but because the database DDL and DMLs are not checked into SVN for most projects, and physically part of the release we end up re-finding those issues in INT and PROD as well. I've suggested a system to keep those in check with the sourcecode but that doesn't seem to have been accepted by that group.

2. The second talk by Jon Stonecash, HTML5 Graphics: Pretty Pictures for Practical Processes was a look at providing graphics using JPG generator, an HTML5 generator, and an SVG generator. It was interesting to note the comparison of that same process to what we've been working on at work recently. It was a lot of code for the amount of output it showed, but it gave me a chance to finish a few tasks this morning like getting TextMate installed finally on my Mac. Some people showed some ignorance and seemed more ready to challenge the speaker. I'm not sure I agreed with them, there are some reasons to at least investigate the SVG technology. Becoming familiar with both the positive and negative aspects of any technology is part of understanding its benefits and limitations.

The Nerdery put on lunch, thanks Nerdery! Even though I had pizza last night, it was nice to not have to spring for every meal today and save a bit. They sound like a fun workplace. They put on a number of volunteer and seminar pieces throughout the year, unfortunately have not been to one yet. It'd be interesting to try the volunteer competition where you come up with a website in 24 hours for a non-profit. One of the UI employees said the groups get to meet with and research the group you'd be working with before the time starts.

3. The third talk I went to, Implementing Messaging Patterns in JavaScript Using the OpenAjax Hub by Kevin Hakanson, was something I was unsure if I would like. But Kevin's talk was timely look at using OpenAjax + his own $hub jquery plugin to help manage and create message events. It was timely because we are at the point in some of our applications where chaining of events is starting to become problematic, we could benefit from Idempotence, message id'ing, and parallel distribution chains. OpenAjax has some message channel based tools which his code adds behaviors onto, and adds functionality like guid ids, timestamps, etc to the message header. I really like that though he addressed the message patterns at an architectural level, he also had qunit tests to demonstrate and test the behavior for the different patterns. I also learned about the deferred object which is how jquery handles the event delay at startup.

Code
Twitter

4. Nothing really grabbed me for the next session, so I spent the time getting ruby on rails, aptana's toolkit installed. Sorry Steve nothing on line on the microsoft site really told me what Metro applications were, and being a Microsoft technology, I'd rather not slip down that dark path.

5. The last session was an interesting hybrid of 4 person peer programming to get a simple site up and running with a number of technologies, some of which I've been researching recently (Sass). To create the structure, rather than boilerplate or Initilizr the Skeleton Framework. Tonight I tried out the skeleton site on several mobile pad devices at Best Buy. Some of the Android tablets don't respond to a rotate, and I don't seem to understand just what is that browser some of them have installed, that looks like a lame google chrome?

Asked a question to the panel and asked if you wanted to start a ruby on rails project, which github would you start with, and they suggested railswizard which I said was the best answer ever.

Didn't win any prizes, but I think Aravind, a co-worker won a book.