We’re on tonight for our fourth DemoCamp in Guelph. Come out and join us and enjoy some free food and drinks courtesy of Communitech.

I’d concur with Joel that the Business of Software conference, organized by Neil Davidson from Red Gate, was the best conference I attended last year. I’m not much for conferences so it was also the only real conference I attended so that’s not saying much. I’d go so far as to say it was the best software conference I’ve attended to date.

They are running it again this year and apparently Joel’s taking over. It’ll be in Boston in fall 2008 and I’m planning to hit it up. If you are interested in attending, and know me personally, then contact me as Neil’s graciously offering a reduced rate to people who attended last year. I’m curious to see what natural disaster they have planned for us this year.

Some examples poached directly from Mark Hurst of business success that has come directly from creating a good experience:

• Amazon
• Apple Store
• SAS
• This one’s cool and would be judged ‘insane’ by most business standards, Holidays and Whole Foods
• Zappos.com

An example of how Mark Hurst has pulled off something similar? They had a small outage with their gootodo application last year, small meaning a few hours I believe. Their response was to email their user base offering a 6 months credit to any user who was interrupted by this outage.

It’s a sad fact that I spent most of my “holidays” rewriting the blueTurbine client in python which is my first real experience with the language. Python is described as a “high-level language“:

“In a high-level language, complex elements can be broken up into simpler, though still fairly complex, elements for which the language provides abstractions, keeping programmers from having to ‘reinvent the wheel.’ For this reason, code which needs to run particularly quickly and efficiently may be written in a lower-level language, even if a higher-level language would make the coding easier.”

I have to agree with the above in that I find it significantly simpler to develop complex concepts into python code as compared to any other language I’ve used. The catch, however, is the “though still fairly complex” part. Being able to translate complex concepts into simpler code does NOT mean it’s simpler to work with complex concepts.

If you happen to be struggling with complex software concepts, or have yet to be exposed to them, then don’t expect python to teach them to you. If anything it’s the exact opposite in that it puts the burden squarely on the developer to completely understand those complex concepts in the first place. Python allows you to code them with less code which means they’re more subtle and less explicit.

That’s amazing for developers who already grasp those concepts. They can be more productive both in reading and writing code. If you’re trying to learn them, however, then I’m not sure how that helps. If anything you may want to spend more time wading through more verbose (less simple) code first? Wow that sounds backwards…

Having said that Bruce Eckel makes a great point about using python as a learning language so what do I know? He doesn’t, however, speak to the idea of learning complex concepts by working on codebases where they exist which is more what I’m speaking to.

“Python would make an even better first language to teach programming. It’s such a gentle learning curve. You can start with scripts, and of course some people dismiss Python as a scripting language, because you can script with it. You start teaching scripts. You can teach functions. Then later you can add classes. Then you can go onto things like metaclasses. Python has many more of these powerful constructs that you can learn when you’re ready. And I think that’s very impressive, because it doesn’t say you should only be an object-oriented programmer.”

Number four is booked for Wednesday Jan 23rd, once again at the Albion. Please sign up here to attend. Please come and check it out. If you’re interested in demo’ing, contact me asap.

Lists, lists and more lists. Instead of going to the effort of creating yet another list for you, I’ll take the even lazier route and paste someone elses…

“Software Engineering tips
Tip 0: You must have code
Tip 1: You must have a technical co-founder
Tip 2: Hire A+ engineers who love coding
Tip 3: Keep the engineering team small and do not outsource
Tip 4: Ask tough questions during the interview
Tip 5: Avoid hiring non-technical managers
Tip 6: Cultivate an agile culture
Tip 7: Do not re-invent the wheel”

This whole audibles category barely exists. What can’t I stop listening to today? Matt Mays is a maritimer from the same area as that loser sid the kid. I’m kidding, I just like giving sid a hard time, he’s great.

Tunes: In session in Vancouver, Matt Mays and El Torpedo.

Links:His allmusic page, his wikipedia page, his site, apparently he’s involved in a movie as well with Sam Roberts and Buck 65.

We’re still looking for designers, see description here. We’re hoping to hold a group gathering late next week with people who are interested. If you’re interested, and haven’t contacted me yet, please do so asap.