My stream-of-consciousness memoir on MinneBar.
Had a blast at MinneBar. The space was a bit small and I think turnout was much higher than anyone anticipated, and it way hot (in the thermal sense), but it succeeded with flying colors at creating “something exciting by being in close proximity to lots of smart people”. Got a chance to meet a guy from the OCaml mailing list, and generaly hung out with a lot of smart people.
The session I lead on executable documentation went pretty well…eventually. When I first showed up, the outlet didn’t work and the projector was sitting too low, but my wonderful wife came up with the solution of stacking chairs and the MinneBar organizer (Ben Edwards) managed to find an outlet that worked. Once we were through with that, I plowed ahead, and there was a really good conversation that ensued.
I’m discovering that it’s kind of hard to illustrate a good example of a Fit document outside the context of some kid of project, though — for future presentations on the topic, I will probably have a mock project and a more complex example. I was hoping to build that interactively during the session, but I simply ran out of time. All in all, though, it seemed like people were really warming to the idea of using story tests to provide a common language between customers and developers. It at least seemed to be a bug that got into people’s ear.
The presentation on Agile Development and Functional Languages totally blew me away. The plan going in was to talk to the half-dozen functional language wonks who showed up about how to do test-driven development and other Agile-esque coding techniques in functional languages, and/or to talk to the Agile folks who showed up about why object-oriented languages seem to be an implicit assumption in Agile thought. The low attendence was also a given assumption by the organizers, I think: they put me in one of the smaller spaces for that presentation. That plan was thrown out in a hurry when I walked into a very, very full space — we had people outside the room all the way to the stairwell trying to get into the conversation. So much for being the only person who cared about functional languages in MN.
The conversation that ensued was really good. There were about five or six people who really became the ad hoc panel, and we talked about advantages of functional languages, and limitations to the adoption. During the talk about the advantages of concurrency with functional languages (see Brian’s post on the matter for more on that), this guy who had his head in his computer most of the time piped up to make an interesting observation: that Rails basically addresses the problem by forcing a single-threaded model, and leaving any “multithreading” aspect out of the user space. I thought that was pretty insightful, and I said something which I can’t really recall, and we moved on — it was until later that I realized it was celebrity guest David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails! I retroactively got a bit fanboyish when I found that out: I’m only now starting to recover.
I ended up having to cut out at about 3 PM. After the presentations, the general lack of food, and the trouble I’ve been having sleep for the past week, I was just kind of done. It’s kinda too bad: I was having some fun, but I just couldn’t do it.
Please feel free to comment on this post if you’d like to continue the conversation from MinneBar, or if you’ve got any feedback for me — I’d like to hear any kind of constructive criticism about the presentation, or any ideas that it got you rolling on.
(A review of functional programming and agile development conversation.)
