When last I wrote, I was busy working on a few talks. They went reasonably well.

MinneWebCon was a lot of fun, an engaging, upbeat conference. There were almost 250 attendees, about two-thirds of which were from the University of Minnesota, which put on the conference. Eric Meyer delivered a keynote in which he discussed craftsmanship in the web professional. How very relevant. Amy Kristin Sanders’s midday keynote offered useful insights about internet law that I cannot do justice to. In Mark Heiman’s enchantingly engaging talk about the search for a social networking tool for Carleton College alumni, I learned about Elgg, an open source social networking platform that looks pretty damn good. I’ll have to take a closer look.

The smartest bit of scheduling was to put unconference sessions immediately after lunch. Rather than nodding off on a full stomach, we got engaged in animated discussion, keeping energy high for the afternoon. Brilliant. The social networking session largely highlighted Twitter, which fit in well with the active back-channel Twitter chatter going on. Tony Thomas wrote a little about that.

My own presentation on JavaScript went almost as well as I hoped, although I ended up not being able to touch on Ajax except immediately afterward in a quick response to a question as I was unplugging from the projector. My emphasis was on taking functional pages and layering helpful behaviors onto them with unobtrusive JavaScript. Video will be available at some point, and I’ll be making my presentation notes available here (and there) soon.

And by the way: in case you didn’t know, jQuery is fantastic.

Many thanks to the MinnWebCon organizers for putting on a great conference and for allowing me to participate. I’m looking forward to next year.

Unfortunately, I was having so much fun preparing for my MinneWebCon talk that I gave short shrift to prepping for the two presentations I had scheduled at the MnSCU IT conference this past week. Thankfully I deliberately chose topics on which I could speak extemporaneously if need be. They turned out okay, but (as always) not as good as I had hoped. My first session explored the limits we’re bumping into with Ajax, especially user interface challenges, nontrivial client-server data communication problems, and the fallacies of distributed computing — setting the stage for the emergence of rich internet application technologies like Flex, AIR, and Silverlight. None of these technologies actually solve the problems, except making it easier to create better-looking UIs, but they should be watched closely. Hell, I’d use Flex in a heartbeat for certain things like, oh, an ERP.

I also spent a few minutes pointing toward all the activity going on around programming languages, concurrency, and flexible approaches to databases (non-relational, sharding, etc.), all related to rising expectations of what software should be able to do and how quickly we should be able to create said software. I talk about this stuff all the time, but hardly anyone seems to believe me. I hope that I at least planted a seed or two that will bear fruit in future discussion, and was heartened upon my return from the conference to see Tim Bray take it up:

Near as I can tell, we’re simultaneously at inflection points in programming languages and databases and network programming and processor architectures and Web development and IT business models and desktop environments. Did I miss anything? What’s bigger news is that we might be inflection-point mode pretty steadily for the next few years.

I don’t know whether I’ll put together notes. I suppose I ought to.

I was a little worried about the session on software security principles, since I had completely changed course on what I wanted to do the night before, but it turned out to go quite well. I wanted to start a discussion, examining common software development scenarios where I often find vulnerabilities, letting the group identify security principles that should guide development. WIth the help of a few security-minded individuals and a lot of people not afraid to put themselves out there even when they weren’t sure of themselves, we did just that. It was a good, active conversation. I was a concerned that one guy who brought up a quite valid point — that by moving our ERP from Win32 client-server to a web application, we’ve increased exposure and risk — was discouraged by the response. I talked with him today, though, and found that he wasn’t at all discouraged and that he had learned what I wanted people to learn:

  • the threat is no longer amateur;
  • software is rarely designed with security in mind, and that’s where the attacks are taking place;
  • there are core principles that should help guide software design and development, such as not trusting input, using least privilege, and so on.

For people like him for whom this is all new, next time I will prepare handouts. If you’re looking for a preview or something to use now, I suggest you start with the excellent resources from the Microsoft patterns and practices group, including Guidance Share. It is not all Microsoft-specific, and there are some real treasures. For a quick run-down of security principles, see this blog entry by J.D. Meier, which lays them out nicely against Microsoft’s security frame.

To my mind, the highlight of the conference was Mike Janke‘s whirlwind tour of the MnSCU network and data centers. We really need to see more of that. Watching his presentation leaves no question of the scale and complexity of the problems of doing IT for an organization the size of ours, and the tremendous job that Mike and his team have done.

The real conference is of course not the sessions but the connections made with people there. Many good conversations were had, but I still didn’t connect with everyone I had hoped to. Folks, you know who you are. Let’s not wait until next year, okay?

Whew! My conference season is pretty much over, so excuse me while I go tackle that growing stack of books.