Barcamp Nashville 2015

Since I missed the PHP meetup earlier this week, I started in Corey Maass' talk on using "WordPress as an Application Platform". Being kinda anti WordPress myself, but knowing some folks love it, I figured I should hear about it from someone who loves loves loves it.

Corey argues that because all the code exists already to solve most problems, it can simplify the development process greatly. My big complaint is that it sucks for developing locally with a team. Unfortunately, Corey confirmed that this hasn't really been solved yet.

Microservices are
- independently deployable + scalable
- bounded to business context
- accessed via technology agnostic interface

Serverless?
- AWS PaaS (managed services)
- business agility
- "API Gateway" to expose APIs
- "Lambda" where code is (only Python, NodeJS & Java)
- "DynamoDB" where data is

Vijay walked us through a quick example API endpoint to create a database row in DynamoDB using a Lambda function called by the API Gateway. Simple to set up and it scales on it's own, but it really traps you in you in the AWS ecosystem.

But unfortunately John Loftis was a no-show, so I ended up coming in late to...

This guy had a lot of energy! I got bored though, because it was mostly everyone in the audience telling what they did for a living. Ergo I left early and headed downstairs to the next talk.

Alan started of talking about the history of the Seattle Underground and continued on with copius examples in history in a discussion about the history of the internet. He talked a lot about web design and various web interfaces, but never really made it out into meatspace - where the "Internet of Things" (IoT) is coming into being. Alan went on and on about how much he loves the Instapaper app, but again failed to tie it to the IoT very well.

While I've talked to Tara Aaron a number of times, I'd never encountered the other half of Aaron Sanders until today. Rick talked excitedly about the big code case of the decade over the Java language. Code is at that weird legal intersection of copyright, patents and trade secrets. Rick's analogy of software as the platypus is particularly good. Since the erosion of patent protection, copyright law is the main legal protection for software.

Copyright only protects expression, so the legal challenge is agruing that software is expressive. Interoperability is code's version of "fair use", which lies outside protection.

The story starts at Sun, who invented Java in the 90's and placed the language as well as the virtual machine (VM) to run it in the public domain. They did, however, keep the copyright on the APIs for whatever reason although they never enforced that copyright. Later on Oracle bought Sun and, as is well known in the tech world, Oracle enforces its pereived legal rights to the fullest extent possible.

Fast forward to the dawning of the smartphone, where Google found itself playing catchup to Apple. Google figured the best way to do that was to use Java as the language for their Android phone. To that end they entered into negotiations with Oracle to use the Java API for Android. Oracle wanted more money that Google was willing to pay though, so Google decided to go its own way and rewrite the Java API for Android. This they very successfully did and soon everyone was programming for Android phones in Java.

Google recreated the exact API organization that existed in Java, and this became a small part of a larger lawsuit Oracle persued againest Google. The main focus of the lawsuit hinged on patents rather than copyright though, because monetary damages awarded there can be much higher. Software copyright is rarely part of lawsuits because the cost of suit is usually larger than any potential payoff.

Google argued that there was only one way to reasonably organize the Java API and one. The example used repeated in the case was that of java.lang.Math.max(x,y) because, really, is there a more natural way to organize it? The judge decided that a legal concept called "merger" applied and ruled in favor of Google.

On a appeal, however, this decision was reversed on the grounds that merger must be from the creator's point of view. The case was sent back to a jury trial and we'll have to wait and see how it turns out. From a business perspective, however, Google is the clear winner. They got Android to market fast and now it is one of the dominant players in the market. Even if they lose, the potential monetary damages awardable are puny for Google and reorganizing the API wouldn't cause developers to stop developing for their very lucrative platform.

https://www.facebook.com/Up-the-Trail-333325870190801/

Ron "Sweaty Yeti" Read shared his tale of hiking the Appalachian Trail Mar 29 - Oct 4 of this year. He got his trail name because of his interest in bigfoot research [sic]. Ignoring that his recounting of the experience was very informative, especially since doing the throughhike is also on my todo list. Ron started with a 55 lb pack and his dog also carried a pack. He pared this down to essentials over the course of the trip and never carried more than 7 days of food, reprovisioning in towns along the way. He would hitchhike into town, reprovision, and stay at a hotel to get a shower in every few days.

The audience did its best to pump him for details:
- He recommended David Miller's Northbound AT Guide.
- Dogs are allowed on most of the trail except Smoky Mountain Nat'l Park and Baxter State Park.
- Hardcore partiers are a persistant problem on the trail, leading to shelter closures.
- Several 1000s start; only 20-25% finish.
- Trail is well marked & hard to get lost.
- Ron switched from boots to trail runners early on.

There weren't enough talks to fill up the afternoon, so they ended #bcn15 early.