Dylan Schiemann

My first morning in Auckland, April 17th, was met with a nice view of Sky Tower from my room at the Latham:

This was also Day 1 of Web’09, one of the most enjoyable conferences I’ve ever attended. With about 200 attendees, conferences for me are all about the people and the hallway track, and this conference was great both for that and for some of the talks. I had the chance to have meaningful discussions with about 50% of the people in attendance which is exceptionally high. The kiwi web development community is very cool and tightly knit relative to other countries.

The morning began with a very impressive video of very cool introductions to the speakers, and nice kick off talks by John Ballinger and Rod Drury, who gave a kiwi-centric overview of the web today:

A few talks in, I felt a bit of vendor overload and had acquired some nice fodder for my talk on Day 2, so I headed back to my room to get some work done before lunch. At lunch I met a number of interesting people, including Rob O’Neill of Computerworld who would later write the follow-up article, Pushing the limits of Flash

I quick sidebar to clarify his comment that referenced me, which was:

At the Web 09 conference in Auckland last month, Flash was still getting some brickbats, most notably from Dojo toolkit co-founder Dylan Schiemann, an open source advocate and HTML and JavaScript fan.

It’s not that Flash and Flex were isolated in criticism by me on Day 2 (I bashed Silverlight and the Open Web as appropriate), but the point of my talk was about freedom (not in the Stallman way) to do what you want with the things you create, to not be stuck with a single vendor as your only choice, and to use it in environments that can easily be migrated or deconstructed, on your own terms. The reason I say not in the Stallman or GPL way is that I want to be able to do what I want with the things I create, and I do not believe that people building on free and open source software necessarily need to give back to the community, as it is their choice to be open or not. In general, I don’t like organizations that waffle frequently on their terms as it confuses people. Also, specifically with regards to Flash, I argued that Flex should have just extended HTML rather than creating an XML syntax from scratch, like we did with Dojo. Why force developers to learn a completely new grammar?

Back to the general part of this story… I had a number of good chats today with people, enjoyed Pamela Fox’s talk about Maps APIs (she’s from Google, but gave a nice overview of other services as well):

I also called Jarrod out during his talk for mentioning every other Ajax toolkit except Dojo, even when talking about Bespin is developed in part with Dojo. He made up for this omission on Day 2 in a big way (Thanks Jarrod!):

If there’s a favorite talk from the conference that I attended (note, I generally only make it to a few talks at any particular conference), it would be Pamela’s talk about maps… it was informative and unconventional.

Prior to dinner, there was a good reception in the foyer of the conference and again I met and chatted with a bunch of great people. After that died down a bit, we headed to the Grand Central bar and had food from the next door restaurant, Murder Burger. While no Fergberger, it was a great burger. A bunch of us sat outside (John B., Morgan, Karl, Pamela, Mike Forbest and about 12 or so more including significant others) and continued our conference conversations for several hours, with only a slight interruption from a guy telling me conspiracy theories that I already know and that perhaps aren’t conspiracies but he was crazy enough to make anyone not believe a word he said. I then headed back to the hotel to finish up some work and make a few minor adjustments to my slides for my talk on Day 2.