existence, refactored

So after spending the entire day walking around doing stuff (and at one point get wrangled into MCing) for DevCon at DevOpsDays, me and a couple PhRUG guys got on a (red-eye?) bus to Baguio City for the non-official Philippine leg of the Global Day of Code Retreat.

This isn’t a full write-up of the event so I’ll keep this short and simple. The event was at Drei‘s place with just a bunch of Ruby, Python, and PHP guys from both Manila and Baguio hacking up random stuff instead of doing the whole Code Retreat thing.

at the after event, aka “Yo dawg, I heard you like taking pictures so here’s a picture of people taking your picture so you can have a picture of you taking pictures of people taking pictures”

Being the slacker that I am, I didn’t have anything planned out beforehand. I thought I’d just go the same route as with Startup Weekend Manila and just be a rubber duck floating around groups. Fortunately, Buddy brought along his significant other Rizza with the intention of having her learn programming from the participants of the event.

I couldn’t resist this teaching challenge. So for the entire event, I went on to give an impromptu crash course on the fundamentals of software development.

I started off with basic imperative/procedural programming via pseudocode (to drill in the idea that software development is not about computers but about solving problems). As we progressed I moved on to Ruby for the more technical side of things (basic data types) up to Object Oriented basics.

first programs – potato salad and quadratic formula

By mid-day, I had this little flash of insanity and began downloading >250MB of development stuff from a certain site.

That flash of insanity was to go back to the original Code Retreat exercise, Conway’s Game of Life, and build it in Java to teach software development: coding conventions, revision control, test automation, refactoring, etc.

Of course, I had to teach the most crucial concept in software development: how to wing it. And that was where Android came in.

So we had a base GoL class and a freshly installed Android SDK. A couple of Google searches later and a lot of guesswork, we were able to make the whole thing work as a Live Wallpaper in around 1.5 hours.

Lack of sleep and preparation can turn a Ruby guy into a Java developer. LOL

Normally, I would’ve posted something like this a lot earlier. But work interfered so…

Anyway, since I won the event, I really don’t have an excuse not to do a post. Blow the cut are some of the lessons I (re)learned at the event.

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We held our monthly meetup last night, and AELogica volunteered to let us use their Fort Bonifacio office as the venue (and provided the food as well).

After a day long InfoQ presentation marathon, I decided to try out recording the meetup with a half-decade old camera.

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Last night was supposed to be just an informal meeting; last month’s low attendance made us move from the “1-3 speakers” scheme to a “10 minute show and tell” programme. But people just kept arriving and everything went better than expected.

And yeah, some guys from Pivotal Labs also showed up and participated in the talks.

The Pivotal guys went with some people from MOL/Friendster. The former were contracted to do some stuff for the latter, but I didn’t ask if they’re rewriting the social networking site in Ruby. (I was too busy eating pizza to eavesdrop) That’s them in the pic above, with Winston presenting in the front.

Anyway, here’s a list of the talks last night:

• Rad talked about fb_graph
• Nate talked about building RubyGems using Jasmine as the example
• Bry talked about web-app-theme
• Johann talked about RubyMine (which, coincidentally, was used also by Nate in his talk)
• Winston talked about GoogleVisualr
• Topher talked about Hancock SSO for Sinatra

Thanks to Exist for sponsoring the venue, Topher for taking pictures, and Topher again (and Rad?) for the food.

For updates on future Ruby meetups, join our Google group.

Red asked me to give a talk in Ignite Manila 1 mainly because he remembered that I tend to break character once in a while back in our old workplace. It should be easy for me to give a presentation on something related to anime given my level of experience in the matter.

Problem is, even if I focused on just anime and manga instead of the entire Japanese hobby culture scene (which would include cosplay, collectibles, etc), I still have literally dozens of possible topics to talk about.

After thinking about it for a day, I went with the topic that I could say that I am really passionate about: the story of how we reversed the fortunes of UP AME; from being a hopeless anime organization into a thriving one. Not only is it a significant part of my life, the topic would also be relevant for most of the audience (I doubt that most of them aren’t inside a club or community of their own).

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I put a decent amount of effort into this talk, not only because I don’t want to embarrass myself or the org, I also don’t want do look like a hypocrite after bashing the presentations in last year’s Y4IT.

Most of my effort went to the slides. It took me at least 3 days to finish them mainly because of my lack of experience (dammit, I’m a software engineer, not a graphic designer!) and because I had to look for good pictures from various sources. I also had to re-read Presentation Zen since it’s been a long time since I’ve made presentations.

Preparation for the talk itself was difficult, though it’s not as hard as the slides. I’d have to thank Scott Berkun for this part, his Confessions of a Public Speaker as well as his Ignite talk on giving Ignite talks gave me invaluable tips for making my talk.

One thing I learned on my own about Ignite was that Ignite presentations are more like song performances than presentations when you have more than 4 points to make. My talk had 7 different points so the timing is important. It didn’t worry me, though, since I have experience singing in front of a lot of people. I just had to practice enough that my mouth goes auto-pilot when on the stage, ignoring the inevitable effects of stage fright.

My script went through at least a dozen revisions throughout my practice sessions. With at least 3 runs per revision, I’m guessing that it took me 60 partial runs (just a 1-minute section) and about 30 full runs to get the hang of things. As you would see below, even with all this practice, I still had to ad-lib and adapt to the situation.

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Oh and yeah, Ana Santos of Sex and Sensibilities talked before me. Talking about hardcore geeks after a talk on sex was kinda awkward. D:

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Script, slides, and side comments below the cut.

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Two months ago, I was invited by Red, a former co-worker, to talk in the first Ignite Manila event. I’m not really busy at the moment so I accepted the offer.

I’m not in the mood to post a long-winded report on the event so here are some highlights:

• The event was great! There was a good mix of topics and the audience was really into it. The only downside I think would be the lack of stereotypical geeks in the crowd (most of the people there were “closet geeks” ).
• The best talks for the night are ironically the least likely to be featured in the global O’Reilly Ignite site: Norman Wilwayco‘s “rebellious” talk (that’s an understatement, pero digs!) and Khavn dela Cruz‘s 5 minute presentation/performance on his potentially controversial Day Old Flicks.
• Probably the most well-balanced talk would be from Carlos Celdran. The topic was socially relevant, the slides were simple and were there to enhance the talk, and he was presenting to the audience and not talking to the wall.
• As for my talk, I’ll leave that to the next post.

Congratulations to the team behind Ignite Manila for this successful event! I’ll be looking forward to the next Ignite Manila!

Last day of Y4iT. I didn’t want to see politicians so I spent the entire day in UP Film Institute.

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My sinuses acted up and gave me a headache for the entire day. This post may be crankier than the two previous ones.

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Body felt like crap and the rain was pouring hard so I decided to ditch the first few talks.

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Underwhelming day 1. My thoughts for each talk under the cut.

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