C4[1] Retrospective
First, a huge thanks to Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch for putting on C4 yet again this year. I can only imagine how much work goes into organizing this and I was very grateful to be able to look forward to and experience such an inspiring weekend yet again this year.
Brackets totally stolen borrowed from Chad Weider.
The Talks
Wolf opened with a talk exploring the ever growing and powerful “indie” developer. From open source development stacks to the interweaving bridges gluing the open source (Python/Ruby/etc.) to the commercial frameworks (Cocoa), more and more indie developers are influencing (if not defining) the future of our environment. While not truly evident until the Iron Coder showcase at the end, even the mighty iPhone’s barriers are crumbling at an astonishing rate. Overall a very inspiring talk and you could see the almost fatherly proudness on Wolf’s face for the C4 group and their accomplishments in this area.
There were a collection of talks that could be grouped under the topic of “Marketing” which was something new to C4 and I think welcome to a nice subgroup of attendees who are still young to the world of Mac indie development. Shipley had a very entertaining review of hype and how it’s worked for Delicious Library while also covering some more specific marketing todos surrounding Google AdWords and the process of launching. Adam Engst of TidBITs compressed an updated version of his noteworthily Hacking the Press talk done at previous MacHacks. Adam of course has the perspective of the editor/publisher, his comments on marketing and working with the press were much more direct than Wil’s and I think worked well together. There are also some older Hacking the Press articles on TidBITs which are relevant and worth reading, should you be interested.
Daniel Jalkut opened Saturday with a talk discussing his recent application acquisitions and tried to pass on as much wisdom as possible should one want to go through the process themselves. For me currently I’m not really planning to do much of this but it was interesting to her Daniel hypothesize on the idea of a Application flipping — taking an existing application adding some polish and making a profit.
Shawn Morel who works on VMware’s Fusion product did a talk discussing how virtualization works and the challenges they face. A little over my head here but kind of interesting. During the Q&A the enviable question of OS X inside of OS X came up. Clearly the developer community is dying for this — if only the higher ups at Apple could understand the potential and take away the legal / bureaucratic issues.
Allan Odgaard did a talk covering the past, present and future of TextMate. In addition to his own challenges and solutions, Allan spent a good chunk of the talk covered the TextMate community and it’s contributions to the application via it’s bundles system.
While known in most circles of his PyObjC efforts, Bob Ippolito’s talk at C4 was all about Erlang. For me this was both cool and over my head. Generally speaking Erlang pre-C4 was some language I heard about via a few Philly on Rails people and Dave Thomas. Bob did a great job introducing the language, its uses and strengths but because of the insane unique and interesting syntax and the new-to-me design patterns I have to admit my eyes glazed over more than once. That said, I am extremely happy to have seen the talk. It’s probably not a technology I’ll use tomorrow but I’m much better prepared to recognizing a future situation where it may come in handy.
Tim Burks’ talk was insanely great. For me Tim Burks was not a name I (or I’d bet many) knew before C4 but after this talk I’m sure he has many new subscribers to his blog to see what he’s up to next. The talk started with poetic stories and biblical references of rebirth to cover the close relationship of Cocoa with Ruby, the RubyCocoa bridge, Tim’s own development of RubyObjC and some seriously cool demos of a circuit design application. For the finale Tim put the hole talk on it’s head, reviewed the frustrating issues experienced when doing Cocoa stuff in Ruby and then introduced his fix: a Object Oriented-smart Lisp that works with ObjC called Nu (still in private development, but looking for people to help). The language geeks in the audience orgasmed.
On Sunday morning, nice and late at 11:00am (so we could all at least try to get through our hangovers) Cabel Sasser did a talk covering the growth of Panic, his process of design and how Coda came to be. Very entertaining and informative. As was posted on the Twitter back channel Cabel could take the talk on the road and charge for tickets.
Iron Coder Live
At the close of the show Iron Coder Live was held and we had 12 or so people present various hacks done up for the iPhone and OS X. I’m not going to review them specifically. Perhaps some other blogger can do that as this post is already crazy long and I didn’t take very good notes. With luck most of the sources will be posted and indexed soon.
Operations Feedback
Location: Being in downtown Chicago worked out great. Specifically, for the tourism I did pre-conference and all the bar hopping we did on Friday / Saturday. The pool-side bar “sessions” were important as it was the only real “social time” when the handful of younger developers could hang out with us while we were drinking. Getting them into the bars is kinda hard.
Food: Dinner on Friday was so-so, the hot breakfasts were very welcome, and Gino’s East was very tasty though I wouldn’t mind a few more plain cheese next year. More caffeine options during the talks would also be cool. Jamba Juice rocks!
Network: Pretty solid for a hotel. Having to do the website to join the network kind of sucks but to be expected. Noteworthy: I didn’t get billed for the day of internet I used in my room on Thurs and I wasn’t part of the conference block either.
Swag: Love the dog tags. T-shirt looks nice and high quality too.
The DrunkenBatman Panel
In the gap of time between the fall of MacHack and the rise of C4 there was an event called Evening at the Adler where a blogger by the name of DrunkenBatman (DB) assembled a great group of Macintosh developers to discuss the topics of the day. Overall the event was a great success and was even made available online so the reach was much broader then the 100 or so people in attendance. When C4[0] of 2006 was announced DB was given an opportunity to do another panel at the C4 show. Reaction to the C4[0] DB Panel was mixed. I got the feeling most people internally rated it as “ok”. Personally I was disappointed as it didn’t feel very focused and the topics that got the most time (DRM and piracy) are topics that I feel at this point have been discussed past their point of usefulness, ie the group discussing and listening have already done so previously and nothing informative was being created. All that said the DB panel of C4[0] was, to put simply, uneventful — nothing to lose any sleep over.
So time passes and C4[1] begins to get planned. At the same time the blogging on the once very active DrunkenBlog stops. There is a post on May 3, 2006 and then nothing until a post May 15, 2007 (about the same time details of C4[1] come out). DB has a panel again which is fine, but the DB post is not the usual “can’t wait for C4,” it’s the “I’m going to go to C4 and punch Vinay Venkatesh in the face because I believe he steals code” variety. Lots of reaction came via blogs and in IRC (comments were not enabled on the post itself) but as the weeks passed by it seems Vinay wouldn’t be coming to C4, a fellow co-worker would do his virtualization talk, and DB would still be doing his panel. I wasn’t involved or have heard any of the real insider information as to the developments that led to these results. Personally, if I were running the show and a presenter or attendee threatened violence for any reason they wouldn’t be invited to come. Even if the allegations of someone stealing code are true — violence isn’t needed anywhere near the aura of C4. In my opinion, the best case for DB would have been to outline his arguments with proof, try to convince the community and then let the community take the required action. So, with all that drama pre-C4 we sit down awaiting DB’s panel with a slight distaste in our mouths but whatever we are having a good time so it’s easy to forget.
The first topic brought up was an idea of applications that are somehow are ripping off / deceiving users and if we as a community have to stop them. The example DB used was an application called Pzizz. Basically he called out the app on it’s benefits as marketed via the website and backed up by hot-linked “scientific evidence.” He followed a path of research that he thought was very questionable and asked the panel if we need to, as a community, call these modern day snake oil salesmen and others like them out. The general reaction from the panel (after taking a deep breath from such an unexpected topic) is that applications that clam outrageous things (ie: MarsEdit will get you laid) and don’t deliver on the promise are naturally phased out by the marketplace. It would be a misplace of power for a select few community leaders to band up and punish a company like that.
Crowd reaction to topic one was mostly bewilderment. It was clearly not a question anyone might have guessed would have been brought up. The amount of time it took DB to present his case to the panel and the attendees clearly seemed to have taken too long. Most in the audience wanted to move on.
The second topic opened with this slide which simple read: “Black people don’t use Macs”. My interpretation of DB’s point was that he felt the community was completely homogenized and that a lack of diverse cultures might have side effects and thus the question to the panel, what might they be. The problem was he didn’t word this well at all. He linked class and race, his perceptions on diversity were flat out wrong to most in the audience and at one point he said something to the effect, the only black people you see around an Apple Store are panhandling for money. At this point I kind of put my head down and started to ask myself what the hell was going on. The twitter back channel was very active and easily became more interesting than talk itself. Eventually the topic moved on but by now everyone was kind of on edge waiting to see what would happen next.
The third and final topic before time ran out was open source. DB it seems is very upset at the state of open source on the Mac. I can’t clarify too much what he was unhappy about (honestly, I was internally counting down to pizza time and leaving this train wreck behind me) but I do remember many successful open source projects being named to counter arguments. Some big boys like Firefox and Adium as well as frameworks like Sparkle. There was even a hands up if you use Sparkle and about half the room raised their hands.
When time had run up we all exited to store our laptops and bags in the hotel rooms and head off to pizza. Commentary on the panel lingered most of the night. I’d be amazed if DB is running a panel again next year. Too many people just saw it as a waste of time and potential. Maybe it was just a bad day or bad planning. I wouldn’t mind reading his arguments on the blog but these weren’t well suited for a panel at all.
To whomever might be running the panel next year, maybe ping the bloggers with some question ideas and ask for feedback ahead of time?
Final Thoughts
In close, despite the drama of the panel, C4 was a terrific success. I can only hope Wolf is up to it again next year.
Posted on: August 13, 2007 – 11:15 PM
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11 Comments
Wow Mike. Great post. Spot on with your analysis of DB and one of the few bloggers with the cajones to really talk about it. Nice.
Well done — great summary.
Wow. He really has gone off the deep end. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for doing a fantastic write-up! It’s like everything I would have talked about, just more eloquently put.
And, yes, the DB panel was awful. Everyone at my table felt we wasted a chance to ask some very smart people questions and have a good discussion for hour and a half.
Yikes! Thanks for filling the rest of us in. Like others, I followed the twitter C4 back channel and wondered what the heck was going on.
I wonder what kind of feedback DB received after the panel and whether he’ll post something on his blog.
Thank you for posting the details of what happened with DB, very appreciated.
I agree with your DB panel review 100%. I darn near got up and walked out. It’s clear that he shouldnt’t have been leading a panel at C4 unless their goal was a shock jock style discussion. The rest of the sessions I thought were great and well worth attending.
Pzizz seems like an odd choice to hate on. Maybe DB should try it, get some good sleep, and wake up to a more cheerful disposition :-)
Nice to read your review. Thanks for writing it! :)
Hope to be there next year.
Dude, what’s with the ‘goatse’ gang sign ? ;-)
A.
Despite its claims to work, or those that claim it doesn’t, I’ve had pretty good results with Pzizz- it’s helped me get to sleep these last few months after years of problems. It’s not something that’s made to change your life, but it just might be something that helps your life.
Great write up of the conference, too!
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