Dylan Schiemann

Michael Mace recently authored a particularly poignant piece on what he feels is really wrong with Blackberry. I found the article interesting because it did a fairly solid job analyzing both technical and business issues faced by RIM.

(Full disclosure: RIM makes contributions to the Dojo Foundation, and this article is strictly my opinion, as unbiased as I can be at this point)

Blackberry 6 in my opinion offers an amazing set of opportunities for mobile web app developers. Wolfram from Uxebu has an in-depth analysis of the Blackberry 6 benefits that roughly match my opinions on the topic, so I’ll not waste time repeating those points.

I’ve had an iPhone since the day it was released, but I’ve not upgraded since the 3G. I’m a jailbreaker and a carrier unlocker: though I keep a contract with AT&T, I cannot justify the international extortionist rates of mobile carriers. I have a Pay & Go SIM card for the UK that gets more use than my AT&T SIM, and a stack of other SIMs from travels (about a dozen SIMs from Thailand, Cambodia, Germany, etc.). I can effectively spend $10-30/month in another country on a pay as you go plan with as much data as needed. But I’m getting way off topic.

The way I see it, RIM has reinvented their web platform in an amazingly powerful way that offers what I had always hoped Apple or Palm WebOS would become. Apple fails me miserably on their attempts at control, a betrayal in my opinion given their wonderful Mac OSX which has been extremely flexible and configurable in a mostly open manner. WebOS has failed so far because the UI and devices just aren’t very nice to use. RIM at the moment has a platform that’s frankly not all that stylish, devices that are currently too slow, but wow, the phone calls actually work and as a developer, I get even more capabilities than I see possible with operating systems like Google’s Android.

I expect my next two phones to be an iPhone 4 and whatever is next from Blackberry. I want the best of both of these worlds, and until I get what I want, I’m going to be a frustrated tinkerer that spends far too much time on this for not enough gain, complaining and grumbling until I can get a device that works in a manner as delightful as iOS, but with the control and freedom I want without a series of silly hacks like installing iPad baseband software on an iPhone to keep it unlocked.

On the business side of things, the internet is currently leading to an interesting phenomenon which is this: a long tail, but a really narrow and tall initial peak. I believe we’re seeing winners take all at a faster rate than ever, but the lower costs of being in many markets leading to many more players than ever (example, open source JavaScript toolkits). But with mobile devices, it’s a very challenging set of problems, from hardware and software to marketing to fickle users to selling souls to the mobile carriers, with very few highly profitable opportunities for mobile device makers, so I expect a very short list of players that can compete viably over the long term.

GigaOm recently ran an article on Predictions if Pay Per Use Comes to Broadband.

This topic has interested me as my travels over the past two years have made several points abundant:

• We take reliable networks for granted
• Hotel Wifi is usually slow, and often connection throttled (both quantity and duration)
• Many worldwide providers have a fairly low “fair-use” cap (e.g. the most expensive BT Broadband plan has a maximum of 100GB a month before they throttle your usage from 4pm to midnight each day (which happen to be peak US Pacific business hours)
• 3G and 4G networks are getting faster and more reliable, but contain extremely low caps
• Any normal usage of video blows through caps (wow does Netflix use a lot of bandwidth)
• The proliferation of Ajax and Comet Apps (my bread and butter) has significantly increased the amount of data we consume, as well as the system resource constraints for each tab open

I believe that in order to sustain the open web going forward, we need at least a 2 orders of magnitude in performance improvement in browsers (memory and cpu usage, not just page load), a better way to handle concurrent http requests on a single page (the tricks we do like image sprites, script concatenation, etc., while useful, are just dirty and wrong), and a way to significantly improve network performance.

Networks currently somehow believe that large producers of content should be paying them for allowing their content over their network (e.g. NetFlix). I’m sorry, but the end user is already paying for this bandwidth.

Developers need to be more efficient with regards to performance impact, but the platform as a whole needs to get fixed, become sane, and reduce resources or else we’re in for some painful years ahead. Unfortunately, until this is fixed in a major way, I believe fair use caps around the world, and pay per use in the USA (since we don’t seem to get the concept) are here to stay.

I’m bored of writing only 140 characters at a time, as I feel like I’m losing my focus. So, without further ado, I’m going to start blogging again.

Some random observations about Thailand:

• Lots of scam artists, but mostly nice people
• The Bangkok Marriott Spa and Resort is amazing, but not the real Thailand (it has Benihana and Trader Vic’s after all
• 7-Eleven is more common here than anything else. I guess gas stations killed that in the US, but it’s also common in Japan, Norway, Sweden, and I’m sure other places.
• Sizzler… yes, they have a perfect franchise of it in Chiang Mai at the mall near the airport. Unlike places like Robinson (a rip of the old Robinsons-May), JayMart, and iStudio which clearly are not the same. Nor is the coffee and computer shop down the street sells Apple computers. It’s called Orange and uses an inverted Apple logo.
• So many simple, multipurpose, affordable things here.
• All of the orange juice here is bright orange as they use mandarin oranges. Strawberry juice is common and cheap. Dragon fruits look more amazing than they taste.

Photos from Thailand

And yes, I know I still haven’t finished blogging about last year’s amazing trip.

A few upcoming Dojo events worth mentioning:

• Dojo Mobile Summit, London, July 31-August 1, 2010. We’re fully booked for this, but if you want to join us Saturday evening, let me know.
• dojo.beer Chicago. This is happening sometime in August (either the weekend of the 21st or 28th). Peter Higgins will be there for this event.
• Dojo Developer Day 2010. Bay Area, October 19-20, 2010. This year’s two-day event will be focused on the Dojo 2.0 API and feature set. We’ll be skipping the community day format of the past, and instead we’ll have a dojo.beer event in the evening. RSVP info. will be available as soon as I have that set up, but be sure to save the date if you’re a Dojo committer or have a very strong interest in the direction of Dojo.

Aaron Newton and I first delivered the Programming to Patterns talk at the Rich Web Experience in Orlando in December, 2009. It’s evolved a fair amount over the past 6 months through various iterations and delivery. Mark Wubben and I recently reworked the Dojo examples a bit as well in preparation for SWDC 2010, and Piotr Zalewa of JSFiddle and I worked on creating examples as easy to run examples.

The latest Programming to Patterns slides are available on SlideShare, and the examples are on JSFiddle:

• Writing the code inside ‘domready’ event (Mootools)
• Writing the code inside ‘domready’ event (Dojo)
• Using objects the MooTools way
• Using objects the Dojo way
• Prototypes and object properties (MooTools)
• Prototypes and object properties (Dojo)
• Extending objects (MooTools)
• Extending objects (Dojo)
• Mixins with Dojo
• Mixins with MooTools
• Program a Pattern (MooTools) and extend it
• Program a Pattern (Dojo) and extend it

I’ll be attending the following events:

• UK Uniface User Group: April 27th at the Compuware Uniface office in Maidenhead, UK. I’ll be speaking on web apps and business implications. Uniface leverages Dojo for deploying web apps with their 4GL framework.
• London Ajax User Group: On May 11th, I’ll be co-hosting the first of a new monthly event on the 2nd Tuesday of each month. Piotr of MooTools and JS Fiddle fame will be the co-host. The June event will be focused on mobile, and July will feature a panel of Comet toolkits. Sign-up for the May event now as space is limited.
• dojo.beer(“copenhagen”): Mark Wubben is organizing a Dojo Beer event for mid-late May in Copenhagen. Send @novemberborn a tweet if you have a suggestion on the date. The 22nd or 23rd is my current preference.
• SWDC 2010: I’ll be speaking again at the 2nd Swedish Scandinavian Web Developer Conference on June 2nd. This year there’s also a second full-day of tracks with an emphasis on mobile web development.
• javascript-az: I’ll be giving an intro to Dojo talk at the new javascript-az group on June 16th!

We were of course in Praha for Djangocon, so we attended some lightning talks on May 5th, 2009:

And Tobias gave a talk on Dojango:

Djangocon has a nice, authentic, no-frills vibe that makes it a great conference.

Praha has great food, as long as you enjoy goulash! I also was exposed to Becherovka (bitters). Praha at night is stunning (excuse my on the move night time attempt at photography):

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Ok, I’m almost a year behind on my blog posts about my trip, so it’s time to wrap it up already!

On May 4th, 2009, I took the train from Berlin to Prague to attend Djangocon.

I had an early departure from the Berlin Hauptbahnhopf:

It’s pretty cool seeing signs for trains that will continue on to places like Budapest:

The train itself was very basic, even in first class:

The train ride was very beautiful scenery… trees, cliffs, rivers, etc. The views of the Elbe, the east-European architecture, Dresden, etc., I was just very surprised taking it all in.

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On May 3rd (day 35 of my trip around the world earlier this year), I received a whirlwind tour of Berlin from Wolfram’s cousin Martin:

Martin grew up in East Germany, so I received a humorous, biased perspective of how much better East Berlin is/was than the west.

The first thing of note was the dichotomy of old and new Berlin. The modernization of the city is impressive, yet the old lives on throughout. There are still obvious quirks in the layout and transit of the city based on the old borders. Because East Berlin had a buffer zone between the wall, everything within a few blocks of the wall has been rebuilt after being in decay for decades. As a result, the east side is more modern than the west, at least near the wall.

The lore behind this tower is that the easterners wanted to build something that could be seen from anywhere on the west side. It was built like a chimney, because that’s what they knew how to build. I don’t know if this is true, because the line for the ride to the top of the tower was too long.

I did not watch the Star Trek movie in Berlin, but did manage to sight a Dojo sticker:

The civic center of Berlin is near the river Spree, and a quick boat tour shows off a number of impressive buildings:

There’s a surprising mix between classic and modern architecture, art, and more, even at the subway stops.

We then continue our walk throughout Berlin, checking out remaining segments of the wall. With the way the wall was divided, you will see random segments throughout the city, some where the original wall was located, some not. Near the wall and Checkpoint Charlie, there’s a fun tourist trap where you can get your passport stamped with replicas of the stamps required before the wall came down.

No landmark would be complete without a Starbucks:

There’s the sobering Jewish memorial:

And more beautiful architecture:

This pink building is pretty shocking:

The west side has this beautiful cathedral that was partially destroyed in WWII and was never repaired. It’s now in a pretty blighted are of Berlin:

We walked by the Berlin Zoo on the way to an impromptu Dojo Beer event at a biergarten:

I met Dirk Schiemann, the first time I’ve met someone with my last name that’s not part of my family. He looks shockingly like like my father, and he has spent much of his life in West Berlin. I also met Bernd, a Dojo user, that would join us in München in a few days.

My day in Berlin came to an end with the angels of Berlin:

Berlin is far too big of a city to see in just one day, especially if you want to really experience any of the sites. Martin did a great job of showing me as much as exposing and wetting my appetite for future visits.