Following the Geekmeet in Stockholm my ex-colleague from etoys (first .com boom) days – Tim Heighes – asked me to come to his new abode – BWIN – and talk about the current developer market situation and ideas what the future of JavaScript and web development might be. Furthermore the idea was to tell the business about the benefits of opening up data to the world.

I was scheduled to give three talks – an overview in the morning about where web development is heading and two technical talks to a smaller, expert audience in the afternoon. As Tim made the mistake of getting me drunk after the Geekmeet I didn’t have any time to prepare dedicated materials, but ad-libbed the overview showing live examples of sites and products I talked about, used GreaseMonkey to show how to prototype changes to web sites and generally reacted to questions and requests from the audience.

The afternoon talks were the performance talk from Geekmeet and my maintainable JavaScript material from the Fronteers conference (also available as a video in two parts part1, part2).

More important than the material was the communication with the teams in bwin and seeing what kind of challenges they have to face in their line of work. That their weapon of choice to battle browser inconsistencies is jQuery was another nice touch for me as it is cool to hear how other libraries than the YUI are used in a large, professional development environment.

I’ve had a great time and hopefully managed to inspire bwin to work more efficiently and open to the world more. It was also good to get to know some great geeks working in the office.

After the workshop Tim took me out for a drink in the city of Stockholm and I ended the evening in the ice bar of my hotel (a bar made from ice with a constant inner temperature of minus five degrees centigrade and very yummy Absolute mix cocktails).

The next morning Tim and Robert Nyman from Geekmeet took me on a tourist trip around the city of Stockholm. I have to say the city is a very nice place indeed and Swedes are wonderful people to visit and work with. I think there is a chance I will be back soon.

To bring some positive effects into this world, here are a few things that made me happy this morning (TTMMHTM):

• YUI is now available on Git: http://github.com/yui
• The interview with Dan Rubin and me after Webmaster Jam session in Atlanta is out: Designing Accessible Websites
• YUI released the tool that creates the YUI API Docs
• Todd Kloots spilled the beans on Developing Accessible widgets with ARIA
• The SearchMonkey team shows you how to find RDF and Microformats information using Yahoo Search

Is this sharing of happiness useful?

I am just getting ready for my second day in Stockholm, Sweden to go to the bwin offices and talk about professional web development and the change of JavaScript. The professional thing is going to be interesting as I am still feeling the beers of the GeekMeet yesterday night.

Talking of GeekMeet, except for the interesting choice of advertising keywords showing up when you look for it, it was a roaring success and if I had a hat it’d be off to the organizers at Creuna and Robert Nyman for pulling this out of their hats (ok, you killed that metaphor, now let it die in peace).

Over 150 geeks came to drink beer and pizza and had to wait for those by listening to my drivel about website performance and ethical hacking. Some seemed to have been inspired by it, so that’s good I guess.

What I have to say to the credit of the Swedish audience is that they have a great sense of humour and are very happy to get distracted by unexpected slides and side-stories. It was great fun presenting and chatting to people afterward.

Credit must also go to Robert Nyman for not being only a masterly “one, two” announcer but also finding a very nice way to introduce myself – playing hangman with my name using all the emails and messages I sent him over the years telling him off for doing things wrong. Thanks for making me sound like a picky bastard, but I understand that it came from the heart. I also explained that my connection with PPK started the same way – but with him being the picky one.

My first presentation revolved around things you can do to speed up your web sites, unashamedly based on the work done by Steve Souders, Nicole Sullivan, Stoyan Stefanov, Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville. You can get the slides on slideshare:

[slideshare id=819648&doc=shiftinggears-1228434047613720-9&w=425]

The second presentation was (re)introducing the concept of ethical hacking and an invitation for people to see the web as their playground using cURL and GreaseMonkey to remix and improve it:

All in all I had a wonderful time and I was impressed how easy it was for me to deliver all of this in such a short amount of time (I just gave seven presentations and two interviews in three days in two countries, having written the presentations on airports and flights in between).

Sweden rocks! Now I am off to check out the ice bar in the hotel and tomorrow it is back to England.

My talk at the Geek Meet in Craiova/Romania last week covered a topic that I consider terribly important right now. As developers we are constantly shooting ourselves in the foot and create new and improved bullets to make it hurt a bit less instead of not doing that.

We constantly complain about the world, our colleagues, the market and of course our “stupid company” but at the same time we got noone to blame but ourselves for a lot of the stupid things that happen to us.

As developers we have this tiny little bad adviser living in our heads: the feature creature^*.

This one keeps telling us constantly not only to add more features to our solutions but it also gives us a terribly inflated sense of what our job is to bring to the world.

It makes us arrogant and ignorant to the solutions that other developers – just like us – already developed and offer for use. In short, it makes us do the same jobs over and over again as we know best instead of telling us to have a look around at what has already been done and tweak or extend it to our needs.

Instead of spending time on creating well-documented software that is built to be customized and allows for plugins and extensions we keep building the same software types we refuse to use ourselves as they don’t exactly do what we want.

Maybe it is time to shut the little feature creature up and work together on bigger, better and more stable solutions. It is not about who can make the fastest and smallest and most optimized code. This is an extra step we should take when we need exceptional performance, not the common use case.

If you want to go nuts on bringing the best out of hardware and technology, go and do some stuff in the demo scene, this is where I got rid of a lot of my bad habits.

I’ve put the slides up on SlideShare:

[slideshare id=799134&doc=resistingthefeaturecreature-1227921707703820-8&w=425]

^* The feature creature is not my invention, I heard it from a speaker in 2004/2005 at the PHP conference in Amsterdam, but for the life of me I cannot remember who it was. He was ranting about Struts a lot, I remember that.