Category: It Happened to Me

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

“Well, well, well…” said Paul Graham at the start of his keynote to much audience laughter. “I thought that having to speak just before Damian Conway’s classic rants on Perl and Klingon, with a complete multimedia slideshow would be the toughest gig I’d ever have to do, and now I hear I have to compete with a band!”

(The band he’s referring to is why the lucky stiff and the Thirsty Cups, whose amazing performance, The Professor’s Pudding, will be covered in a later entry.)

After warning the audience that he was going to contradict both the Old Testament and Yoda, he launched into his well-delivered and intriguing presentation, The Power of the Marginal. It’s an excellent polemic on the advantages of being an outsider, the corrupt tests that cause the jerks to rise to the top, how being on the outside leaves you free to take the risks that are commensurate with rewards, how small is beautiful and less is more, and why you know you’ve won when your work is being called “inappropriate”.

Although it was written and presented to a community consisting largely of software developers writing for a non-mainstream programming framework, The Power of the Marginal should be required reading for creatives of all sorts, whether you’re a writer, an artist, an engineer or a chef. If you are a maker of things or ideas, be sure to read this essay.

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

I’m back from Chicago, where I attended the first international Ruby on Rails Conference, better known as RailsConf. Taking place from Friday, June 23rd to Sunday, June 25th, it was the largest single gathering of Ruby on Rails developers ever held. The vibe there was great — it was a mix of geek congeniality and collegiality at its best, mixed with a very palapable sense of “we’re onto something very big here!”.

Between the rather spotty wireless connectivity at the venue and the events that ran rather late for a conference of this sort, I haven’t had a chance to blog about the event until now. For the next couple of days, I’ll be posting notes and observations about the conference here on Accordion Guy and also on my work blog, Tucows Farm. There’ll be overlap between most of the entries in the two blogs, with the not-as-appropriate-for-the-work-blog stuff — such as the Tale of the Squishy Cows and the Overzealous Airport Security Guy in Latex Gloves — not going into the work blog..

The Cult of Mac at RailsConf

Geek conferences are famous for what I call “hallway gatherings” — clusters of people gathered together around power sources, chatting and working away on their laptops. During the conference, a scene like the one below was very common:

The fourth guy from the left is none other than Chad Fowler, one of the brain trust behind the conference, Pragmatic Programmers author and all-round good guy. The guy in the black shirt who’s two positions to the right of Chad is Adam Keys, the funny geek who invited me to play accordion at his presentation.

While the gathering shown above isn’t unusual, what is unusual is the concetration of Macs. Wherever you looked, you saw a PowerBook or MacBook. Glowing Apple logos abounded — it seemed that there were 30 Macs for every non-Mac laptop. It seemed that among those non-Mac laptops, most were running some distribution of Linux rather than Windows.

I’m not alone in noting the abundance of Macs: check out this blog entry, as well as this, this and this.

Here’s a video where I did a quick sweep of a hallway cluster’s laptops after finding that they were all some form of Macintosh computer [3.7 MB QuickTime]. It’s all “Mac…Mac..Mac…”

It’s another interesting chapter in the rise of the Mac among the not-quite-mainstream programmer crowd, a trend that first became apparent during the first O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference back in 2002. All through RailsConf, I was reminded of Tim O’Reilly’s remarks in his 2002 WWDC keynote, Watching the “Alpha Geeks”: OS X and the Next Big Thing.

The RailsConf Nonconformists

Seeing they were in the minority, Christian Metts handed out “Certificates of Nonconformity” to people sporting non-Macintosh laptops and took their photos. These RailsConf nonconformists were also photographed for posterity, and the photos have been collected in this Flickr set.

The most famous of the nonconformists was none other than the enigmatic Rubyist known only as why the lucky stiff, who posed in classic “why” fashion with his certificate:

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Actually, I’ve been in Chicago since late Thursday afternoon and RailsConf since Friday, but the internet connection’s been rather spotty, what with 600 nerds all hitting the local wireless access point all at once. Things have been pretty good, and I’ll have a full report in a couple of days.

If you are one of my friends, acquaintances or business associates, I probably owe you an email, phone call or visit. Things have been rather busy both at work and at home, but rest assured, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I ask for your patience and promise not to keep you waiting like the good captain below:

Click the photo above to see the synopsis for this Star Trek episode.

I’ll be attending the Ruby on Rails conference called RailsConf in Chicago (well, actually O’Hare) from Friday, June 23rd to Sunday, June 25th to learn as much as I can about Rails and the Rails community, as well as to schmooze avec accordion. I’ll be arriving in the early afternoon on Thursday, June 22nd to hang out with Dave and poke about Chicago proper, a city I haven’t had the chance to visit since doing some client work there in 1998, or 1 B.A. (Before Accordion). Chicago is the home of Manly Food, which means meat, and lots of it. I’m looking forward to the trip!