Working from home, OSCON, AJAX, Groovy and global warming

I work from home most of the time. No sitting in a car in hours of traffic. Fresh organic food from my own refrigerator. A nice office with natural light, colorful walls, lots of space. And I forget how great this all is until I head off to the airport (this time to OSCON 2006 in Portland). Ugly carpets and fluorescent lights in the airport. Of course, the flight is delayed. I don't get into my hotel until 2am. The room smells of smoke, is tiny, and completely sterile, the AC barely works and I lie awake most of the night sweating in my sheets. “Interesting” breakfast at the hotel restaurants, more fluorescent lights in the tutorials all day, more interesting food for lunch, impossible network connection.

I can't imagine how road warriors do it. They must build some kind of mental, emotional and spiritual wall inside so it doesn't affect them. I am trying very hard to stay away from the TV so I don't turn into a pale, untanned mass of protoplasm.

But it does make me think that the open source movement is allowing more and more of us to choose a different lifestyle, where we can stay at home, be with our families and pets, eat better; all this and making the environment and the traffic just a little bit better. Yes, it's true, I sometimes miss the face-to-face interactions, but the open source movement has also engendered a number of creative ways of staying in touch, from Wikis to blogs to podcasts and webcasts. And I actually get to “meet” more people through my open source work than I ever would have done working just within my own company.

Much as I dislike the travel and hotel experience, I have been getting a lot out of the conference itself already. Today and tomorrow are tutorials.I'm trying to learn as much as I can about JavaScript, AJAX, Rails and other web technologies. I have been a database and server weenie for so much of my career, but my interest on embedding the database in the browser has thrown me head-first into web technologies. It's a different world, one which is both full of creativity and full of hacks. There are times when I shake my head at the contortions web developers have to go through to build compelling and cool applications, while at the same time dealing with non-trivial issues like security, scalability and maintainability.

It makes me value all the tools that simplify, simplify, simplify the poor developer's life. In the AJAX world, it seems like the component libraries are key. Things like dojo and prototype and jMaki and script.aculo.us. Ruby on Rails also seems to be a lifesaver. I would love to see something like Ruby running in the browser, but right now it's just JavaScript and yes, Java, (although there are large camps who still won't touch Java in the browser with a ten-foot pole).

If the rumors are true and Java is going to be open-sourced, then maybe some folks will spend some time to fix some of the issues with Java in the browser, and folks will start looking at it again for the browser, if only as a virtual machine to run dynamic languages like Ruby and Groovy.

I have just started dipping my toes into these languages, but what encourages me about Groovy is it appears to have many of the benefits of Ruby, but at the same time it takes advantage of the compatibility, security and large base of APIs that is available in Java. That and the fact that Groovy can run in the browser (on top of the Java VM), whereas, at least today, that's not possible with Ruby.

By the way, here is an interesting blog by Jon Tirsen comparing Groovy and Ruby. And of course, here's Hani's bileblog about Groovy. Where did this guy come from? He reminds me of the old SNL skit “Point/Counterpoint” between Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin (“Jane, you ignorant slut”).

Did I mention it's hot here? Of course, it's hot everywhere. Somebody let me know when the ice caps melt.