Sunday, April 10, 2016

Pep Talks

I'm reviewing these four presentations in the order in which I viewed them.

First comes Steven Witten, a really talented guy with a love of spatial animation and a willingness to share his craft.  Peter Farrell, who uses Pygame to similar ends, clued me about this talk.


Now comes some sober and intelligent advice from John Allsopp, a web developer noticing the trade-offs between mastery / learn-ability and short term convenience at the latter's price, of added complexity.

In the rush to "get it done" we may condemn ourselves to "perpetual infancy".



Dovetailing with the above, comes this talk from New Zealand by Scott Hanselman, a guy from Portland, Oregon (I don't know him (yet)).

He works for Microsoft, which has come a long way in Open Source, since the early days of Sara Ford.

The storytelling here is high quality.  Like John (above), he gives the ten thousand foot historical view.


BTW, TypeScript, on which Angular2 is based (JavaScript in the cloud), is Microsoft's baby, while Angular itself is one of Google's.

I followed Scott somewhere else (on Youtube that is) before he went on to Poland (Scott gets around):


Whereas I don't share his specific disciplines regarding emails and so on, given a different life situation and modus operendi, I'm respectful of the need for self-discipline, whatever shape that takes.

Both of Scott's talks are quirky and state of the art at the same time.

Bravo on all four.