tigerbears!

Pete Forde’s presentation on Jester is blowing my mind. I am totally going to steal his approach.

More to the point, this is a incredibly cool technology, and the presentation is coming with a great implied mini-tutorial on a few Ruby basics. Most appreciated was the realtime code demo. Seeing the database get modified by simple commands in Firebug’s Javascript console was a real “Aha!” moment for a bunch of us who like to see things before we believe they’re easy. :)

I think Jester will work well for this game idea I have. Definitely one to research and try out.

Something else that I thought was interesting was when Pete noted that we, as developers, often “aren’t creating for people anymore.” I’ve had a few conversations like that around here in the last day or so, and it’s about time that we start taking that idea even more seriously. Fortunately, it seems like more and more of us are at least thinking about it, but I think there’s still a lot of unrealized opportunities out there.Hm. More on that when I’m not posting via iPhone. ;) Thoughts?

Did I miss something in the opening talk, or is there no WiFi available … at an Ajax developers’ conference? I was looking forward to posting and reading more live updates. At least Bill Scott’s anti-patterns talk is interesting, and his book based on it will be cool, I’m sure.

TAE is coming up again, and I’m really pumped up for it. It’s only my second time, but I had such a blast in Boston last fall that I wasn’t going to pass it up when it’s just up the 101, even on my own dime. I still see most of my old Netflix buddies pretty often, but it’ll be cool to catch up with the Yahoo guys and other reprobates.

One of my favorite presenters from last October, Glenn Vanderburg, recently gave a talk at JAOO called The Beauty of Ruby. Since I’m coming to Ruby from a Java perspective, as he did, I was interested in seeing what excited him about the language.

I’m not going to try to reiterate all of his points, but I’d definitely recommend it to anyone else who might be feeling a little bit leery of abandoning their beloved static typing. ;) We’ve been doing it for years on the client side in Javascript, but it feels a little different to do this after so many years of Java. Glenn has a great point about this, and I’ll let him make it.