Today was the second day of GOTO, and it has been a really fun and interesting day for me. As I wrote yesterday I got to do an interview with Scott Hanselman. Actually it almost fell through, because of a communication blip, but thanks to Twitter the day was saved. Scott found out that I tweeted about doing the interview, so he tweeted back, we made the arrangements and got back on track. 
As it turns out doing an interview with a guy who knows so much about doing interviews himself was a great way to start. Scott gave me a couple of pro-tips reguarding sound and editing, and he had a set of microphones in his bag that we used to make the quality even better. I won’t give away any spoilers today, but once we get past the conference days I will write about the actual interview and work on the video.
In reguard to talks I went to a talk on Riak Core with Steve Vinoski which was really good and he managed to convince me that I need to take a look at Riak as an alternative to where I have been leaning towards mongoDB. The distribution model in Riak seems very well thought out, and it seems like a good product to work with.
Later I gave in to my interest for programming languages, with a talk by Damian Conway entitled Sex and Violence about Pearl 6 and then a talk about polyglot programming. Finishing off the talks I saw Hadi Hariri from jetbrains talk about developers as the primadonnas of the 21st century. I think this is the kind of talk that we as developers need to see once in a while. Hadi made some good points about all the stuff we do that makes us lose focus. Methodologies, development tools and principles drag us into dogmatic wars on practices causing us to drift away from delivering solutions to real programs and away from programming motherfucker!
After the official program a talk with Anders Hejlsberg was arranged with ANUG, our local usergroup. We got a good introduction to TypeScript, which was just announced yesterday. To me what they are doing just makes so much sence, as a way to alleviate some of the pains that we face today when building and especially maintaining applications in JavaScript.
Personally I do not have much faith in languages such as Dart, because I don’t beleive in the approach they have taken. In my oppinion it is very unlikely it will be accepted as a standard, and the abstractions are too different from JavaScript for the compilation process to produce JavaScript that is fast and easy to debug. TypeScript does not make this mistake, as it is designed to add a thin layer on top of JavaScript that in turn provides possibilities to build strong tooling while providing some of the structural constructs that we know and love from C#. Interesting stuff so I hope to hear more tomorrow when I do my next interview which is with Anders Heilsberg himself.
Subscribe