I was one of +150(?) people who turned up at Microsoft’s Brisbane office (one of the shiny buildings on the river in the CBD) for YOW! Nights last night. Pam Fox (Google) and Erik Döernburg (ThoughtWorks) both gave talks about Google APIs and build systems.
Pam’s an entertaining speaker, although the content of the talk wasn’t all that interesting – an (almost) hour long “shopping list” of Google’s APIs wasn’t all that exciting – but I did pick up a few interesting tidbits:
- Google Wave is built on GWT
- Google’s established/supporting/whatever the Data Liberation Front, which is a good idea because data retention is one of the big issues with SaaS-ish offerings
I’ve heard Erik speak before at JAOO/YOW! Brisbane 2009. The talk last night was a lot like that conference talk, but he’s moved a few ideas on. A couple of ideas of note from the slides:
- Build should be fast.
- If the build breaks it should be fixed immediately. Hurah!
- Selenium works for automated acceptance testing web applications.
- ScrewUnit works for unit testing JavaScript
- “Just because it’s JavaScript doesn’t mean it’s not code” – a quote from one of Erik’s workmates.
- fakenamegenerator.com works for generating synthetic data
My final observation is really just confirmation that I’m getting old. There were lots of fresh faces in the crowd, someone called Erik a “veteran” of the software industry (he can’t be that much older than me, can he?) and Pam talked about being at USC “way back in 2003″ (or some such date). Hmm… At least I’m not at old as the guy sitting next to me!!
Maybe this isn’t news to anyone, but these are my “take aways” from YOW! Nights. Oh, and some nice pizza, beer and conversation.
