aussie coder . com

Hey guys,

So in the lead-up to the Code Camp in Wagga, that happens around April, I thought I’d put together an aggregated tumbleblog so that news on the lead-up and on the event itself can be found in one place (or at least gets some good links that will provide better Google rankings for those that make the effort).

So what I’m planning on doing there is subscribing to any Google blog search rss entries that mention Code Camp Oz, any twitter entries marked #ccoz, any flickr photos marked ccoz, and whatever else I can find along the way.

If anyone has any suggestions on posts to add at any time to the feed, or another site to aggregate in, then please forward them on to me.

The link blog can be found at: http://ccoz.tumblr.com/

I was looking through my feeds and I saw a quote in an article that makes incredibly little sense to me from a usability stand-point, and I think works as a thought for how we develop user interfaces for our clients as well.

The quote was about how easy it is to develop for the Sony Playstation 3, from Kaz Hirai:

“We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that [developers] want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?” explained Hirai.

I guess what he was meaning was that the Playstation is technologically advanced and there’s a learning curve involved that there will always be more limits to push in it for the next 10 years.

However, what he has said is why make it easy on people to develop for, when we can make them learn over the next 9 1/2 years how to do it the best way – it’s like a challenge!

Do you know what you get if you make it easier to develop to the best of the consoles strengths straight off the bat?  What’s the advantage?

NINE AND A HALF YEARS OF BRILLIANT GAMES.

That would be awful for a games console wouldn’t it? A glut of quality games would be ridiculous.

Okay, it’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s something to remember when we’re developing our own user interfaces – do we spend the time trying to figure the easiest way possible for someone to interact with our software, or do we allow complexity?

There’s a learning curve, there’s how quickly someone can become productive, how much we introduce a reliance on a particular person to do their job.

I don’t know how many times I have talked to someone about how someone is irreplaceable because of the knowledge that one person has for a system or procedure, how much training it would take to replace them, and retrain someone else.

Great, that person is intrenched and has fantastic job security – but on the flip-side you’ve effectively made it so that person can’t be promoted, and you’d have second thoughts shifting them to a different job if they actively sought it.

So it’s never doing the person or the company a favour – complexity in usability is bad, if only because one day you’ll get the call to support what it does and have to remember yourself.

Just a follow up on yesterday’s post.

There is another Aussie Dot Net Email list that seems active over at: http://groups.google.com.au/group/ausdotnetlist

I’d suggest if you want to subscribe however, to open up one of the emails on there and use the email subscription link, as Google groups only wanted to allow me to subscribe to the daily digest and not individual emails – and it seems hosted elsewhere.

I was having a talk on this the other day with Matt Hamilton during work, but how active would you say the Australian Development Community is today?  Is it more or less active than a year ago, or two years ago?

Mitch Denny and the guys do a fantastic job of giving us Code Camp Oz every year, and same goes for Greg Low and the SQL Code Camp but the rest of the time I think it’s gone pretty quiet (although I don’t get to go to Tech.Ed).

Maybe it’s just me, but since Frank Arrigo moved to Seattle the old Tech Talk Blogs has died off, the last post being over two years ago, everyones moved on to Twitter to a large degree and blog posts “feel” less regular, and I was just wondering if it was a general impression that I’ve gotten or whether it’s something felt by others as well.

For the record, the Microsoft guys I’ve seen or talked to on Twitter are still a bit active and Nick Hodge has offered to come out and talk to us at the Albury/Wodonga .NET Users Group in the past (Dave Glover has actually been to see us in the past also), but I can’t even name the guy that replaced Frank at Microsoft for the Australian Dev community.

That being said, I don’t belong to any of the email groups or anything around.

So I have to ask the question, for anyone who stumbles across this blog, is the Aussie Dev community getting quieter, or is it just my perception of it?

Any recommendations on where the conversations are happening?

Edit:

And in a case of FAIL on my part, Frank Arrigo had actually posted about the new head of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism division, Gianpaolo Carraro, the day before I posted this, but I was on the road and only just caught up on my feeds!

So there is a new series of Alt .NET groups started up for Australia in the capital cities (namely Sydney, Brisbane and Perth).  You can find them at this address: http://ozalt.net/

There is also an email list going on that is not too active at the moment but might gain momentum.

I’m a bit surprised to see the groups created, although I know there is a great interest in furthering learning for development in Australia, as witnessed by the amounts of people that travel from all over the country to attend Code Camp Oz, I wouldn’t have thought there was a whole lot of interest in segregating these groups apart from the Dot Net User Groups already in existence.

I know that the *DNUG system does have some ties to Microsoft, even though our local group has only received passing support occasionally from Microsoft – although they’ve asked if we wanted presenters, it’s not like they have that much to do with us.

But I wouldn’t have thought it’d be that important to start new groups, when I’d personally prefer to see the same ideas behind Alt.NET brought back into the *DNUG groups.  I know in our small group we couldn’t sustain a second group for the township – as well I know that the guys in the group would be open to presentations on anything that could help their .NET development, be it Microsoft technology or anything else.

Anyway, I guess the guys who are behind this have their reasons and I wish the groups well, and hope to hear good things coming out of them – it’d be interesting to see some Aussie guys get involved visibly in the Alt .NET community.

And hopefully some of them might have a session or something back at the Code Camp to let the rest of us know what they’re about!

Hey there and welcome to a new start of a long journey for me.

I’m not sure what this site will end up being but the idea will be to use it more for discussing the technical and development related thoughts going through my head, and to keep my old blog on a more personal, or trivial level.

That being said I’m not starting this off too quickly, and I’m not even sure if it will cover what I am working on, or germinate more into what I see going on in the community and trends.

Anyway, like I said it’s a journey and hopefully I provide some value for others along the way.

Check in later for my first real post!