NilObject

I got back yesterday afternoon from my very quick trip to Chicago. I stayed at the Travelodge downtown, and had a nice (but chilly) walk to the Adler planetarium. It was a bit longer of a walk than I was expecting, but due to being right next to Lake Michigan it was a beautiful walk. I got in and sat down towards the back. I then realized that Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch was on the panel, and he and I knew each other from ADHOC/MacHack of years past. Since I missed him at this year’s ADHOC, I decided I would go an say, “Hi.”

He was sitting next to Brent Simmons of Ranchero software, the makers of the best RSS reader for Mac OS X. Of course, I didn’t know who we was at the time, but Wolf and I talked for a bit, and I went back to take my seat. A few minutes later, I noticed Bob Kuehne walk in — he’s a great guy that I met at ADHOC this past year, and worked temporarily on a window server hack with (he had to leave early to present a session at SIGGRAPH). He took a seat up front, and since I was sitting alone at that time, I went and sat next to him and caught up.

Pretty soon, the forum began. Some familiar faces formed the panel, including (from left to right) Rosyna from Unsanity, August Mueller of Flying Meat, Inc (author of VoodooPad), Jason Harris (ShapeShifter), Paul Kafasis (Rogue Amoeba Software), Wil Shipley (Founder of the Omni Group, co-founder of Delicious Monster), Brent Simmons (Ranchero Software), Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch (author of Mach_*), Nicholas Jitkoff (author of QuickSilver), Bob Frank (Apple, founder of Chicago’s Cocoa And WebObjects User Group), and Eric Peyton (Apple, original creator of Fire — the chat application, not the thing that burns you).

Part of me wished I was on the panel. The other part of me just enjoyed sitting and listening to their thoughts on different topics, including the business aspects of being a small developer for the Macintosh. DRM was discussed, the future of computing and computer languages, the joys of unit tests and frameworks (Wil Shipley’s blog has had controversial discussion about these topics, so they were brought up). There was a short intermission halfway through, and I ran into a few people I knew from ADHOC during it.

Afterwards was a social gathering with alcoholic drinks and food at Jaks Tap, in a reserved room for us. Of the roughly 225+ attendees (there were still a few open seats in the audience), I’d estimate a good 100-150 showed up. Bob and I were walking to attempt to hail a cab when one of the people in the group next to me asked if we knew where we were going. I didn’t, but Bob did. He explained it, and then come to find out, said person had a car and ended up giving us a lift.

We were one of the first people to show up at Jaks, and the waitress was taking orders. I hadn’t had anything since a small meal on the airplane at 11:00 earlier that day, so I ordered a great BBQ brisket sandwich with fries. The waitress was wanting to have the person organizing the event make an announcement. The conversation was something like:

Waitress: Do you guys know who’s in charge of this event?
Us: (Pause) (Slight laughter) Well, yes. His name is Drunken Batman. (Laughter)
Waitress: (Laughs) That’s the same name I got before. I was hoping someone actually knew who he was.

Hilarity ensued. For attempting to serve a group as large as ours without fixed seating arrangements, she did a wonderful job. Sure, I didn’t get my root beer until the third time I asked, but she was getting towards her wits end. And when I did get my root beer, it was the best root beer I have had in quite some time

While standing there, another person walked in who Bob and I both immediately recognized. Yet another person that I had known from at ADHOC. He joined our group of six gathered around this table, eating food and discussing various topics. I haven’t had this much geek fun since back at ADHOC.

At around 2:00, Bob (who coincidentally was staying at the Travelodge as well) and I decided to call it an evening and split a cab back to the hotel. On the way out, however, I finally ran into Drunken Batman again. I had attempted to start a conversation a few times because I had emailed him before the event offering a helping hand. I finally introduced myself, and we talked for a moment. A few minutes later, I was headed back to the hotel to grab 4 hours of sleep before getting up and heading out the door back to the airport.

It was an incredible time, and I’ve already commented on the Drunken Blog saying that I truly hope it happens again in the future.

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Well, I just got back from the Universal Binary Workshop day 1 here in Austin. The goal in attending wasn’t really to learn much, but to mainly gain useful contacts. I’ve met and talked to a several great people.

First off, I “met” George Warner, a very present person on the Carbon-Dev mailing list of Apple’s. I didn’t realize it until he recognized me from MacHack, but I had actually met him in the past, but in those days I wasn’t on the Carbon-Dev list, so I didn’t know his name. However, he’s a very cool guy, who has a great and varied wealth of knowledge. He’s also got a great sense of humor, which I had gathered before meeting him simply recalling some of his posts on the Carbon list

Matt Formica is Apple’s Cocoa, Universal Binary, and various other technologies Evangelist. He did the presentations today, and also knows quite a bit of great knowledge. Not quite as related to what I ended up working on today, but still a great person to talk to and get to know.

Ronnie — I don’t recall his last name — is an Apple engineer who worked a lot on Rosetta. He helped me a lot with questions I had, relating to what I was working on today. Along the same lines, one engineer that I had met at WWDC also was here, and he and I talked quite a bit today as well.

All in all, it was a great day. I did end up learning quite a bit. Over the last year, I’ve been getting more and more into compiler work for my fun projects. Recently, I’ve been focusing more on learning the intricacies of compilers by reading several books, and today I worked quite a bit on the Mach-O linker, doing some refactoring work that has been begging to happen for a while. This lead to a quite extensive IM conversation with Mars, and at the end of the day, I can honestly say I understand the Mach-O linker enough to hopefully ease some of Mars’ work in the future

Well, I’m going to relax for the evening so that I can get up bright and early to fight traffic again. How’s everyone else’s projects coming?

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