Dylan Schiemann

A quick Dojo Developer Day 2 (3D2) recap:

Alex and I started with an overview of what’s going well with Dojo, and where we can improve (polish and performance). We then moved into a moderated discussion of what Dojo needs to become, that had a lot of ideas, but not a very solid set of conclusions. It did give us a great opportunity to discuss things face to face.

Over lunch we had a show and tell, with myself, Owen, Chris Mitchell, Gavin Doughtie, Greg Murray, and Brad Neuberg showing demos of work done with Dojo.

After lunch, we discussed a proposal to split out the Dojo widgets into a subproject, and then broken out into sessions to discuss data, offline, widgets, project infrastructure, build system, and documentation in good detail.

We ended the day with dinner at Compadres and bowling at Palo Alto Bowl.

Overall, it was a fun, productive day without a lot of controversy.

We’ve had a number of interesting posts recently on the SitePen blog around our new Dojo Offline Toolkit efforts, and around reducing toolkit bloat. These two topics are of particular importance to the long-term success of web apps.

We’re also pleased to announce a few new Dojo Training courses. If you have any questions about our training, let us know. Our training sessions are stuffed full with useful information and best practices.

Update: eWeek is now running an article on the Dojo Offline Toolkit: Ajax Toolkit lets web apps work offline

The kde project is making impressive use of native svg in the desktop and within applications.

Infoworld has announced that Dojo has won their award Best Open Source Ajax Kit for 2007. Congratulations and thanks to everyone in the Dojo community for their outstanding contributions over the past 2 1/2 years!

ThinkVitamin is now featuring my article, Create cross-browser vector graphics, an article about dojo.gfx. The article is intended to show where we are today and what is possible with dojo’s vector graphics APIs.

Today I saw an “official announcement from Yahoo!”, where it was recommended that I “update” my browser to Internet Explorer 7.

I could understand this recommendation if I used IE 6 or 5. But I was browsing in Firefox, and i don’t have an interest in a downgrade of my current browsing experience.

But that was more forgivable than the fact that I’m using a Mac (and no, I was not running from Parallels)!

It’s a bit surprising to see Yahoo! spending valuable screen real estate on such an untargeted message, instead of employing simple browser detection that has worked in every major browser since the mid-1990s.

So out of curiosity, I decided to click on the official Yahoo! announcement:

What am I missing here? I can’t see how this would be a positive or intended result for Yahoo! or Microsoft.

On Friday, I had the opportunity to give a Dojo update at Mozilla. Spending time with the Mozillans is always a great honor, as their hard work makes our development efforts possible and much more pleasant. Mozilla co-sponsored Dojo’s summer internship program (along with SitePen, and the Google Summer of Code), and this was a brief session to show off the fruits of that labor, namely dojo.gfx.

Brendan Eich reminded me that we are so highly motivated to work with the landscape (i.e. suffer through pain when the browser doesn’t do as we expect), we as toolkit developers, can and should do more to get what we need out of our browsers. Sometimes we become so pragmatic in trying to fix everything in the browsers ourselves that we forget to remind Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and Microsoft of the pain we suffer. Providing testcases to show where they can do better, and getting a real clear sense of exactly what causes significant performance bottlenecks should be a major goal for Dojo in 2007 as we continue our efforts to make JavaScript development easier and more powerful.

It’s been far too many months since I’ve blogged. While I’ve been blogging occasionally on the SitePen blog and the Dojo blog, I was tired of maintaining my home grown blogging solution which amounted to an XML source file that was a lot similar to an Atom format, some XSLT files to generate HTML, RSS, and Atom, and then a manual upload to the server. Not fun, and really not worth the effort. So without further delay, I’ve updated my web site to bring it out of the 90s and its small boxes, using Matt‘s fine WordPress product, a nice theme from the WordPress theme site, and a header image from a photo while flying somewhere near Santa Barbara.

Demographics

Favorite Food

Chocolate Chip Cookes
French Fries

Current Interest

Thoroughly enjoying the journey…

About Me

I’m a, for lack of a better word, “businessman” by day and a hard-core programmer by night, which is awesome because I love doing both, even if it means giving up those extra couple hours of sleep each night.

I’m currently working full time with SitePen and previously, have worked at a number of other great companies including Renkoo, Informatica, Security FrameWorks, and Vizional Technologies to name a few.

I currently reside in Palo Alto, CA with my wife, Carrie and my three obnoxious dogs, Maverick, Abel & Mycroft (Myke).

Profiles

Elitizmr
Flickr
LinkedIn

The past year has been by far the best and most successful of my professional life. I have devoted significant amounts of effort to helping build Renkoo, Dojo, and SitePen. Renkoo has evolved into an amazing, cool, useful web application, Dojo has become a leader among many many JavaScript toolkits, and SitePen has grown at a rate I never would have imagined, providing significant web application development and consulting services.

With this success, however, has come a lot of conflict. Two amazing opportunities, and not enough time in the day to focus on both.

On one hand, I could continue to shortchange Dojo and SitePen, and miss what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a big part of the changing landscape of web development. On the other hand, I could give less to Renkoo, a fun, exciting company with a great product and direction. Neither option made me feel good, and I was torn between these two possibilities for a very long time.

Recently, Joyce and Adam helped me resolve this difficult struggle. I have resigned from Renkoo effective immediately to pursue my work on Dojo and SitePen. This was not an easy decision for Joyce, Adam, or myself, given that we are good friends, and I was with them at Renkoo on day 1.

So what next?

I will be spending a lot of time growing SitePen and Dojo into everything I hope they can be. Renkoo and SitePen will become business partners. In addition to providing ongoing development to Renkoo, we will also be doing some great stuff together to bring Renkoo’s amazing Comet server and client (mod_pubsub) to more and more web applications.

Over the past year, the world has changed in ways that I could not have predicted or expected. Just a year ago, Dojo was having trouble getting traction, and Ajax was just becoming a buzzword. Today, the demand and interest in Ajax, Comet, Dojo, event-driven apps, and SitePen has grown immensely. I’m really excited to see what the next year will bring!