Dylan Schiemann

If you’re looking to attend a conference or two, QCon San Francisco in November has a new track titled the Browser as a Platform. I had the opportunity to speak at QCon Beijing and QCon Tokyo in April, and had ample opportunity to get to know Floyd from InfoQ. We started talking and that led to this track that I am hosting. I’ve lined up a set of talks that I’m excited to hear. Hopefully this track goes well and can expand into something bigger next year! I’ll also be conducting a one-day Intro to Dojo, Comet, Grids, and Charts workshop prior to the conference.

In December, I’ll be speaking at the Rich Web Experience in Orlando. No Fluff Just Stuff is organizing this conference, and they are going out of their way to line up a great collection of speakers and events. I’ll be speaking about Dojo, Comet, and the future of the open web.

I’m also tentatively scheduled to give the previously mentioned Intro to Dojo, Comet, Grids, and Charts workshop at the end of September during the London Digital Week. If you’re in London and want a quick crash course on Dojo, this is a great event and will of course include a Dojo Beer event in the evening.

Finally, there are tentative plans for a free evening Comet panel hosted by SVWebBuilder in late October in Mountain View. More details to follow on this event.

On April 30th, I flew from Amsterdam to Munich. Unfortunately, This meant missing the bulk of the Queen’s Day festivities and the million or more people crowding in the city. That said, I’m part German and Irish, and I was excited to start exploring my ancestral roots!

The lounge in Amsterdam was pretty lacking in the food and service department, but provided a reasonably quiet place to hang out prior to my flight. Lufthansa’s (and perhaps other European carriers) definition of business class on a regional jet is: no one sits next to you, you get a meal, and a curtain and sign between your section and the rest of the plane. It was somewhat amusing when a passenger inquired about sitting in the empty row behind me. The flight attendant said no, and explained that it was for business class passengers only. Given that it looks identical to coach other than the divider curtain, it made me laugh because she stated it as if it was obvious that this section was somehow different and more extravagant.

I was disappointed that I did not get a passport stamp when arriving in Munich. For anyone traveling around Europe, if you want to collect passport stamps, you’ll need to connect through the UK or Ireland frequently, as they are not part of the EU customs region. I found the train into the hoptbahnhopf and was greeted by Tobias and Wolfram, the other two thirds of Uxebu. Tobias drove us to lunch where I has my first authentic German or Bavarian meal which consisted of a pretzel (of course) and a sort of ham steak. I received a bit of a driving tour of Munich on the way to Wolfram’s house. It’s a beautiful city with lots of parks and greenery and nice architecture.

At Wolfram’s house, we worked for a bit and then I met his wife and kids. His wife is from Spain, and their kids speak German and Spanish, but not English yet. After hanging out for a bit, Tobias went home to Augsburg, and Wolfram and I met a few other developers in the Kellar and had dinner inside a beer barrel. The waiter was initially impatient and kurt with me, so after I dished it back a bit, he was a lot more tolerable. According to Wolfram, waiters in Munich somehow think that people want to be treated poorly… I guess they want to be like New York.

The best part about the day was getting to see the German language spoken live, and to observe the culture of Germans. I see a lot of stubborn traits in me that I seem to share with other Deutschlanders. We seem to be picky and set in our ways, regardless of what that way is! I speak German like a preschooler… hopefully I can get up to kindergarten level by the time I leave Germany. My Deutsch vocabulary is reasonable, but my ability to construct sentences is long list since the days of Herr Parkhurst in high school back in the late 80s.

On April 29th, I was still in Amsterdam. After another wonderful brunch at the hotel, this time with Peter, I gave my talk at SpringOne. It was the last talk of the conference and Peter bought me a nice pint of pear cider which I finished while delivering a lengthy (75 minute) presentation on Dojo, with an emphasis on Data, REST, and integration with Spring. This was a new slide deck and the talk went reasonably well.

After the conference, I checked out of the hotel early. Tomorrow is Queen’s Day, the biggest holiday of the year in the Netherlands, and public transit is shut down in the area near my hotel. So we headed to Nikolai’s flat to drop off my bags, and then we headed to dinner before walking around the streets of Amsterdam. Throughout the city we would walk into random street parties with bands or DJs. Each block was a completely different scene… the crowds were a bit overwhelming in places. People were decked out in orange everywhere we went… Vicki was nice enough to provide us with orange shoelaces… apparently my ginger hair wasn’t quite festive enough for the occasion. Overall though it was a lot of fun and a great spectacle to see, and my photos don’t do it justice at all.

On April 28th, I was in Amsterdam. After another wonderful brunch at the hotel and working on finishing the slides for my conference presentation, I spent my afternoon at the Van Gogh museum.

Not everyone is a Van Gogh fan, but I generally always have been because I was fascinated by the way his art form changed so drastically as did his sanity. One thing I learned was how to say his name properly rather than the American-ized “van-go”… instead it is van-gough, in a very Dutch cough-ish way.

I was very lucky in visiting the museum during this visit, because the visiting collection included much of the rest of his work including Starry Night. I was most fascinated by the fact that Van Gogh created mockups of most of his work, in the form of drawings and letters and journal entries. Why is this fascinating? Well, because it’s what web developers do today. Michaelangelo obviously did this with various sculpture drafts in working his way up to David, but it has never really occurred to me that painters did this as well with diagrams and drawings of what they were planning.

As is this case with most great museums, photography was not allowed so there’s not much for me to show.

For dinner, Peter, Nikolai and I had dinner with a local developer. The first place we met was not open, so we meandered around a bit until we found a surprisingly excellent Thai restaurant. We walked around for a while and found an interesting Belgian bar with eclectic American music, and then called it a night.

On April 27, 2009, I woke up and had an amazing breakfast buffet at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. Their breakfast feast puts to shame almost any other brunch out there.

During the morning, I caught up on work and did a very small amount of shopping and exploring. I retrieved my badge for SpringOne and attended a session of two before heading over to Nikolai’s place to meet up with Peter Higgins. I don’t speak until April 29th, so I was more focused on tonight’s Dojo Beer event.

We met up at De Balie and had a drink or two before walking a while and eventually settling on a decent restaurant for dinner. After dinner we walked around to a few other pubs before calling it a night.

Overall, today was a fun day in Amsterdam filled with discussions about Dojo and JavaScript.

On April 26 2009, Nikolai Onken met me at Schiphol airport, and we had a good chance to drive around Amsterdam so I quickly got a nice feel of the city. Amsterdam is a great city with a number of interesting historical buildings, and many many canals and bridges.

As it just a few days before Queens Day, the city was quickly gearing up for festivities, with a fair setup in the park right outside my hotel.

We went to Nikolai and Vicki’s new place for a great dinner. Their building is brand new, so the elevator had a fair amount of tagging on temporary boards protecting the elevator from people moving in. We added our own Dojo tag:

After a great dinner, I found my way back to the hotel via the tram system. I am staying at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, the conference hotel for the SpringOne conference where I am speaking about Dojo. The people in Amsterdam seem a bit more reserved and shy than in Australia and New Zealand, which surprised me a bit given that this is Amsterdam after all.

Will Riley of Lucid Desktop created a cool video showing a code swarm visualization of the history of the Dojo Toolkit. Thanks Will!

On April 25th (ANZAC day!), I slept in a bit and then found a taxi for the airport. ANZAC day is a holiday much like the US Memorial Day, “honouring members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I.” The event made traffic a bit of a challenge, but it was worth seeing the great memorial festivities.

I arrived at the Sydney airport and found my way to Singapore Air, which had just confirmed my flight a day before. Unlike all of my other tickets, they had placed me on a stand-by list which they did not clear until the last minute. The A380 is a very popular aircraft, and my efforts to get upgraded to suite class, which had empty seats, were met with laughter.

The Sydney airport was nice, and the lounge had a reasonably good selection of food. When it was time to board, I made my way to the boarding area which had four lanes to handle each class on each deck:

Once on-board this monstrously large plane though, it felt very cozy and intimate. Because the seats are 34″ wide (so wide that two people could sit together in them), everything just felt spacious and comfortable. The mood and comfort of the seats and planes was just all around awesome.

The food and service was excellent, and the bathroom was larger than many hotel bathrooms. The flight attendants were serving a good selection of cocktails which would help me sleep more easily on my next flight. After 8.5 glorious hours, we arrived in Singapore.

The Singapore airport is very cool, including a gym, movie theatre, and more. I didn’t have enough time to enjoy these perks. Because of Singapore’s positioning as a hub for the world, they seemed to have flights at any time of day or night. The airport was the most Americanized of all of the Asian airports I visited, with English being the dominant language. The Singapore Air business class lounge was outstanding, but was also very crowded even late at night. After about 90 minutes, it was time to go to the gate to board. As was becoming more common in various international airports, I had to go through security again before boarding at the gate.

I then had the best night of sleep so far on the trip, sleeping for the first 7 hours of my 13.5 hour flight to London. This really helped adjust my sleep schedule to European time. I really enjoyed my time in the east, and moving on to Europe was a bit of an initial disappointment.

I arrived in London surprisingly refreshed, and then walked through a maze of corridors, took a bus, and then walked through another maze and a security and customs line. All of this, and I wasn’t even staying in London for this part of the trip!

The Star Alliance lounge offered much needed shower facilities which were high in quality, and a decent selection of breakfast foods. The wifi was a bit spotty, but overall it was a great place to spend a few hours while waiting for a flight from London to Amsterdam.

The older parts of Heathrow airport are under heavy repair. BMI switched us to a very small plane so there was no business class for the very short flight which was fine.

The flight itself was an uneventful 55 minutes of waiting and 35 minutes of flying. I arrived in Amsterdam ready to see the city and I was met at the airport by my friend Nikolai Onken.

On April 24th, I walked a few kilometers around Sydney and across the Harbour Bridge towards McMahons Point, the location of Greg Wilkins’ boat. I had some great views of the harbour and other parts of Sydney.

Greg and a friend share a nice sailboat, and after a few months of repairs, they were ready to transport it to a moor closer to Greg’s place in Manly. We spent several hours touring the harbour and eventually did some light sailing when the winds pick up. I’ve never really sailed, but with only the three of us on board, I was put to use. Tourists were taking our picture from their tour boats which was pretty amusing. Sailing around Sydney provides some excellent views of the Opera House, and sunset at the moor created some really great images as well:

Greg, Jan, and I then had dinner at the (arguably) best pizza place in Sydney at the trendy Manly ferry building. We had a great conversation, and then it was time for me to catch the last ferry across to Circular Quay near my hotel in Sydney.

On April 23rd, I walked around Sydney some more, and then had lunch with Pamela Fox whom I met at Web ‘09 and a few members of the Google Maps team at Google Sydney. They have a great location with a nice harbour-side view.

After lunch, I walked around Darling Harbour which contains a sea museum as well as an aquarium, and a bunch of shopping, before walking back to my hotel.

For dinner, we had a Dojo Beer event at 3 Weeds, which offered a great combination of tapas and drinks, including some good ciders.