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Sharing a Week With the GUADEC GenerationPosted by hansmuller on June 20, 2003 at 02:18 AM | Comments (2)I'm here at Trinity College for the 4th annual GNOME users and developers conference (GUADEC) in Dublin Ireland. Dublin Ireland time is eight hours ahead of PST back in Silicon Valley however I've mostly overcome the jet lag. Except from 1-2 PM every day when I feel like a narcoleptic. It's 1:30 right now and it feels like my brain is draped with a big hot wet wool blanket. That was as far as this blog got on Tuesday. After failing to find a way to make both eyes focus on the screen at the same time, I stumbled out of the computer room to find strong coffee. The computer room was the conference's social hub. As rooms go it wasn't terribly impressive: a big windowless room filled with folding tables surrounded by chairs, plenty of outlets on the floor, and a broadband ethernet cable duct taped to the table in front of each chair. It's hard to explain how inviting your own little space at the internet trough can look after you've been offline for a few days. The computer room was a magnet for the folks attending the conference. It was jammed all day with GNOME developers who were yacking and hacking and enjoying the camaraderie. It was here that I discovered some things about the conference and the GNOME community:
Last week I spent the entire week at JavaOne and had a great time of it. One consistent theme that JavaOne attendees have fed back to the conference committee is that they want more technical content in the sessions. They want to see source code. This week I was at the conference (GUADEC) where code was king. The technical sessions were filled with developers hacking away at their laptops while the speaker talked about code and in some cases actually wrote code while everyone watched. Raptly. In one session the speaker ran a new (JIT) compiler on a small app and everyone watched attentively for several minutes while the instructions the compiler generated scrolled by in blur on the screen. These are my people. One of the most memorable keynote presentations of the week was given by Alan Kay, who appeared via a video link from his home in California. The average age of the GNOME developers I met at GUADEC was probably mid 20s and I felt very old, although not as old as Alan Kay. Alan's presentation began with an inspiring review of projects he'd worked on (or witnessed) back in the 1960s, including some great video of those old apps in action. Ivan Sutherland's early 1960s "SketchPad" drawing application, which featured the first use of multiple windows (SketchPad3), still looks great. Users draw directly on the screen with a stylus and the app recognizes crudely drawn simple shapes and redraws them as perfect rectangles or semi-circles or rectangular polygons. Alan pointed out that this was the first object oriented system - a user could create classes of graphic objects, editing the class changed existing instances. There was also a 1966 video of Doug Engelbart using a combination mouse/keyboard system to navigate around a little information tree. Response time was excellent even though the app was running on a 1/2 MIP time sharing system with 192KBytes of memory. Engelbart's goal was (is): "augmenting the collective IQ of groups of people". Still seems like a worthwhile goal. These projects and more like them were intended to inspire everyone to build new apps that were atleast as capable as the ones built 40 years ago. Ofcourse there was an implicit dig in the call to action - we've lost the ability to craft small responsive apps even though we're now working with hardware that has 1000 times the capacity of what our forefathers had to work with. In other words, why does it take so much more code and computer horsepower to build high performance interactive data visualization apps then it used to? There are a variety of tired responses to such questions, some cynical, others self deprecating. The one that's not trotted out very often is the punchline to an old Bill Gates joke - "that was the demo". Great demos are a combination of technology and theater that deliver a little shot of adrenaline to the viewers imagination. The 1960s era demos we saw were certainly masterpieces, however they were still only demos. The difficulty of turning the vision those demos inspired into apps suitable for everyday use by everyone should not be underestimated. Hollywood had us traveling to the moon in the movies 40 years before anyone set foot there. Bulding practical useful systems that deliver on the implicit promises in great demos is hard and it's time consuming. The GNOME community has done as much for Linux desktop computing and I can say from personal experience that it works like a champ. Bookmark blog post:  del.icio.us  Digg  DZone  Furl  Reddit
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