dev8D

For my third year running, I have attended Dev8D. I was hoping that even though I had a great time last year, can it get better? Well the answer to that is yes! Since having a tiny exposure to Scheme, I decided to try some of the code labs learning different functional languages.

On the first day, I attended the Erlang course (session 1 in the morning, and session 2 in the afternoon). This session was excellently done, obviously by a professional trainer. Being I had only done alittle bit of functional programming previously I was surprised how quickly I was able to keep up and start doing stuff. I have to say I am very impressed at Erlang’s ability to deal with processes, I think I spawned 100,000 processes in just over 2 seconds! Also I liked how easy it is to send messages between processes and give responses, no wonder Facebook use it for their chat system. I also went to the Python session, this language was interesting (though I was slightly miffed at the concept of no atomic types and everything is a object idea).

On the second day, I attended the Kinect Hacking session. I really enjoyed this session as it really shows great potential for interesting HCI in many different areas. I didn’t personally get involved but more took a backseat on it, as I didn’t have a Kinect with me and the hacking software seemed slightly ropy and I didn’t want that all on my macbook. I found it great how it mapped out arms, I just wished I had the chance to see the helicopter flying with the Kinect! :(. For the afternoon, I attended the clojure session. This session was great, where by we were taught the basics of clojure using a squareroot example program. This was very interesting and insightful, though have to admit heavy on my head. I have loved learning something new at this event.
Overall this year was somehow even better than last! And I can’t wait until the next.