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What I’m excited about, post-conference edition

Wow, I’ve had a really busy month. I’ve attended (and spoken at) BarCamp London, Media in Transition, d.Construct, RailsConf Europe, Euro Foo and EuroOSCON. All were excellent, and each one nicely complemented the others. I’m exhausted. I think my brain is full.

My favourite question to ask new people I meet at conferences is “what are you excited about?”. It’s better than “what do you do?” (their job might not be as exciting as what they do in their spare time) and often gets a really interesting reply. People often ask me the same back, so here are three things that have been catching my attention recently.

  • OpenID. It’s criminal that so few people are playing with this. I gave talks about it at both BarCamp and Euro Foo—it’s decentralised single sign-on that works, and it’s trivial to implement thanks to really solid libraries for most programming languages. There’s also a $5,000 bounty to help spur adoption. I’ll be writing a lot more about this in the future.

  • Virtualization. This was a common thread at several conferences, and the recent popularity of Parallels for browser testing barely scratches the surface. Virtual servers have a bunch of advantages over physical servers: you can clone them instantly, you can migrate them between machines (while they are still running if you’re using Xen) and Amazon’s EC2 offers utility computing on an enormous scale.

  • Dynamic languages on virtual machines. IronPython 1.0 is out, Sun have hired the JRuby guys. It looks like dynamic languages are finally being taken seriously as useful and powerful alternatives to C# and Java. Programmers on those VMs get more productive languages, while users of those languages gain access to enormous existing class libraries, not to mention the promise of significant performance boosts.

Finally, since I’ve blogged the last two releases of Python I can’t resist saying a few things about the new Python 2.5. It’s all good, but the stuff that really stands out is the addition of sqlite3, ElementTree and ctypes to the standard library. Batteries included!

Posted 22nd September 2006 at 12:25 am

This is What I’m excited about, post-conference edition by Simon Willison, posted on 22nd September 2006.

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12 comments

  1. "It's criminal that so few people are playing with this."

    Actually, it seems pretty obvious to me why "so few" people are playing with it. I go to the OpenID site you link to, read the first bit, and I'm interested. What do I do next?

    There are no links to How to Implement or How to Get Your OpenID pages or descriptions. There are link to libraries, but not a lot of hints as to what you might do with them. Is this how I get an OpenID? Is this how I run an OpenID server? Is this how I add OpenID authentication to my existing site?

    There just isn't a lot of high level, here's what you might want to do kind of information. It makes the project feel immature, even if it isn't, and it certainly requires a larger time commitment for investigation, all before you know if it's going to be worthwhile or not. That's a recipe for people saying "I'll come back to this and check it out, someday."

    Alderete - 22nd September 2006 11:02 - #

  2. On the OpenID point I'd have to agree with Alderete. The site mentioned is very poor at describing what OpenID actually is. Clicking around a bit and reading a few other pages on related sites gave slightly more information but not enough.

    Also, whilst a de-centralised login system is a great idea, I think it goes against most people's desire to have a single and clear point of contact in case of problems and particularly with which to attribute blame when things go wrong.

    Ed Eliot - 22nd September 2006 17:18 - #

  3. It sounds like OpenID needs a screencast...

    Simon Willison - 22nd September 2006 17:36 - #

  4. Simon - nice idea. BTW, did you post the slides from your OpenID talk anywhere? I unfortunately missed your talk at BarCamp.

    Ed Eliot - 22nd September 2006 17:46 - #

  5. Hi Simon. Nice meeting you and chatting at Foo! With regards to OpenID, I will echo the thoughts of the other commenters above and will also add this: I came into the OpenID session at Foo being *very interested* in the concept and wanting to learn more about it on a practical level. Unfortunately, I came out of the session less interested than I was going in. I don't think this was your fault at all since other people were asking the questions, but the whole thing seemed to get sidetracked around discussions of which servers handshake with which servers and whatnot. That stuff is great, but what people really want to know is more about the *use cases* for OpenID. What companies could benefit from it and how? What can we do to begin managing reputations with it? What are some of the issues keeping businesses from adopting it? That sort of stuff. A compelling story needs to be told before people will take a hand in the future of it. Who is the best person to tell this story? I don't know. It could definitely be you though!

    Mike D. - 23rd September 2006 01:27 - #

  6. Another interesting question is "What are you playing with now?" as it gives a better idea of "attention". So much excites me, but I'm _currently_ spending my limited free time playing with DBIx::Class and learning various web application frameworks (to steal concepts from and put in Zimki.)

    Mark Fowler - 24th September 2006 09:54 - #

  7. Your RailsConfEurope talk looks interesting. Any chance you will make that available? Thanks.

    TJ Stankus - 25th September 2006 14:07 - #

  8. What were the main interests in the coference, please let me know.

    vps hosting - 27th September 2006 10:50 - #

  9. Regarding your "cut-out art" blogmark: I'm quite sure Peter Callesen is from Denmark, not Vietnam: Peter Callesen - Selected Works

    Fredrik - 4th October 2006 10:47 - #

  10. I was interested in OpenID briefly, but what makes having a url for logging into somewhere superior to an email address? I don't understand, if your web app wants data it still needs to ask for it from the user.

    Frankie Robertson - 14th October 2006 20:41 - #

  12. The idea with OpenId is that you only have to log in once with username & password, and that identity carries over to other web sites. It gives you single sign-on amongst OpenId-savvy web sites.

    I have played with OpenId on web app I was fiddling with a while back.

    Damian Cugley - 20th October 2006 18:56 - #

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