I had the good fortune of attending my first CodeMash a couple of weeks ago. CodeMash is a conference in Sandusky, OH in the middle of winter at an indoor waterpark/convention center. All 1200 tickets were sold out in 20 minutes and the registration rush brought EventBrite’s servers to their knees. There weren’t any Perl talks (maybe I’ll submit one next year), but there was a wide range of topics to choose from.

Building For the Cloud at Netflix

Carl Quinn from Netflix gave an excellent talk on how Netflix uses Amazon Web Services. They have a really slick setup where a deployment involves simply firing up a new, pre-baked instance and redirecting traffic to it through the load balancer. The new version runs alongside the old version and a rollback simply involves telling the load balancer to send all traffic back to the old version. By pre-baking images they avoid having to do any scripting on the instance as part of deployment. Pretty slick. And their so redundant with their Cassandra instances, they put them on ephemeral storage, which means that the data disappears if the instance is shutdown.

Becoming a Ruby Gemcutter

I only caught the second half of Nick Quaranto’s talk on building ruby gems, but what I did see was a good outline of best practices for creating and managing your own gems. I was also interested to learn of GemTesters, which is basically CPAN Testers for Ruby. I often hear Perl mongers mention that no other community has something like CPAN Testers and that makes Perl better. Well, Ruby has it.

Cooking Environments With Chef

I was really looking forward to this talk by Colin Gemmell and wasn’t disappointed. Colin went over the basics of knife, roles, recipes, and cookbooks, while making it all seem so easy. I’ve even started playing around with Chef at work already and am hoping to automate a good chunk of our infrastructure management with it. Nothing like a developer pretending to be a sysadmin. I think we call that devops now.

Cross-Platform Mobile Apps With jQuery Mobile

I had the misfortune of fumbling around with jQTouch this summer, so I was looking forward to hearing about how the 1.0 release of jQuery Mobile was working out. Apparently a lot has changed since the summer and it is now on a path to becoming the dominant browser-based mobile framework. It’s even got Visual Studio 2010 and Dreamweaver CS5 integration, which indicates some serious momentum to me. I’m hoping to get the opportunity to play around with this some more on a side project.

Information Overload

Scott Hanselman is one of the best speakers you will ever see at a tech conference and this talk did not disappoint. He went over how to deal with information overload. Scott gets hundreds of emails a day and can never hope to give everybody the slice of his time that they wish they could have. Dealing with this has led to him developing a number of techniques for coping. For example, he splits his inbox by whether the message was sent to him or he was just CC’d. If you CC him on an email, he may never read it. If it was important you would have sent it to him. The talk was a blend of many time management and organization techniques and I highly encourage you to check it out once it’s up on InfoQ within the next few months.

Beautiful Front End Code With Backbone.js and CoffeeScript

Backbone.js and CoffeeScript are two tools that I’ve been interested in, but have not had the motivation to actually check out. I’ve been through the quagmire of trying to understand jQuery eventing gone wild. And I’ve been the one writing the code. At some point ad-hoc event handlers just gets to be too much to manage and that is where a tool like Backbone.js comes in handy. Backbone.js is just a client-side MVC framework. That’s it. And coupled with the expressiveness of CoffeeScript you can get a lot done with just a little bit of code. I see myself using this judiciously in the future. For many sites it would be overkill, but even those sites often have certain pages which are more JS-heavy than others.

It was a great conference. Many attendees consider CodeMash to be the best conference they attend every year. I was just about the only Perl guy there, but it was great being immersed with developers with a wide variety of skills. And it’s very satisfying to play in a waterpark in January while it snows outside.