Pictures From Pablo's Fiesta - Open Space Austin TX Oct 30,2011

I went to my first Open Space Conference, Los Techies's Pablo's Fiesta. Here's a few photos:

Doc Lister started by giving the ground rules of an Open Space Conference. Four ideas and one rule; or was it four suggestions and two golden rules? Whatever.



Matt Hinze was one of the suggesters of sessions for the next day.


Jeffery Palermo suggested a session on how to hire programmers.



Our list of sessions:

We did a "fishbowl" exercise with five chairs, one has to be empty, and people talked about software quality - reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair.


Jeffery Palermo and Steve Done hosted a session on how to hire good employees. Jeffery asked a good set of questions:
How long does it take to learn you've made a mistake in hiring? How can you simulate the process in hiring to avoid making that mistake?
Jeffery did something very good near the end of the talk. He asked everyone who had contributed to the discussion to be quiet so we could hear from those who were quiet. This had the effect, for a little while, of silencing those who had been a little too verbose early on.








My random tidbits:
Test your site in IE early. Sometimes IE's JavaScript is so glacial your site is unusable.
Check out Blueprint.css for web templates.
Node.js is a server-side JavaScript library to host simple web sites.
Watin is preferred for Web GUI testing.
Use Socket.IO library for web sockets
http://dailyjs.com/ for your daily dose of JS.
Cloud9ide.com is an interesting site - your browser is the ide. Cloud9 will publish your site directly to github. Cloud9 doesn't do compiling, because the cool kids are writing in scripting languages.
Checkout John Teague's blog. He did a great session on Node.js
coffeekup.org
Use nhprof.com to profile your nhibernate code. Other ORMs: dapper, petaPoco, Massive
Sql 98 GoldParse.txt
CQRS - Command Query Responsibility Segregation
SignalR is an event sourcing library that degrades well over different browsers. It tries WebSockets. If the browser doesn't support them it tries a flash program, then long polling to communicate with the server. (This can be bad if you have a lot of customers using old browser using long polling - can tie up threads on the web server)
trello uses SignalR
NServiceBus