Tulsa School of Dev

Tulsa School of DevThis year's Tulsa School of Dev had lots of changes from last year.

  1. New event "chairperson" - Sean Whitesell
  2. New event venue - TCC Northeast Campus
  3. New event website platform - WordPress with custom plugins
  4. New event focus - "hands-on" content

First, the rough edges

For one, we (i.e., Tulsa Web Devs) didn't polish up the website as much as we should have. It was clumsy to do speakers, talks, and technologies with custom post types. I'm still looking for a good open-source lanyrd/eventbrite-type cms - anyone know of one?

TCC Northeast wasn't a good venue - the campus has a weird layout; the common area wasn't suited for lunch and rooms were far away from registration and not conducive to a good hallway track.

Aside from the above issues, I liked the event.

I especially liked mingling with the developers. I had a chance to meet Lindsey, Cory, and Matt from The Div and I hope we do many more events together. I also met Jesse Harlin who did a mobile HTML5 geolocating note app for the 2nd half of the web track. Tulsa Web Devs got together to watch the ustream of the April meeting of OKC.js - the group Jesse and Vance Lucas are running in OKC. I also rubbed shoulders with developers from outside our web community bubble - i.e., mostly Enterprise and Microsoft developers. I still wish there was more interaction between the two "camps" though, along with the sizable Java group in town.

Microsoft was really cool - they gave away a free Windows Phone to attendees who built and published a Windows Phone app that day. I may have to ask if we can give phones away at Tulsa Tech Fest to HTML5 mobile web app developers - let them pick between a B2G phone or a Windows Phone. ;)

I'm looking forward to next year's School of Dev. My notes for improvement:

  1. Improve the format preparation (talks in the morning, workshops in the afternoon?)
  2. Book a better venue
  3. Promote earlier

Most importantly, we'll keep bringing Tulsa area developers together!

Beer & Tech Community Events

Disclaimer: I like beer. I read about beer. I make my own beer. I even go to a Benedictine Abbey once a month to brew beer with monks.

Chris shared Ryan Funduk's post describing the tech community's enthusiasm for alcohol that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, excludes non-drinkers. Ryan makes a keen insight that deserves wider consideration - that the alcohol "fun gamut" attracts brogrammers.

Obviously, "brogrammers" aren't the only ones in our community who enjoy alcohol. Ryan correctly points out that drinking is widespread, yet "brogrammers" are, thankfully, a small though obnoxious minority. So we can ask bigger questions - What is it about alcohol that we like? What does it do to us? Then finally, how should we incorporate it into community events?

What is it about CH3CH2OH that we like?

Science!Alcohol directly affects the prefrontal cortex responsible for judgement and inhibition by prolonging the opening of chloride ion channels which floods post-synaptic cells with chloride ions so the cells cannot as readily respond to stimuli. Alcohol also inhibits dopamine breakdown which extends our dopamine system's pleasure sensations. Alcohol acts as a sedative on our entire central nervous system.[1]

Our brains need some R&R -  All of this can be especially relaxing for people (like developers?) who are constantly exercising their central nervous system; the prefrontal cortex is particularly believed to work on complex cognitive behavior like solving abstract problems. No wonder we like to give it a rest!

Alcohol is an identity microscope

True SelfAs we relax our prefrontal cortex, we also lose inhibitions and judgement.

A couple years ago I discussed this from a Christian perspective with my theology professors (over a couple pints of beer, of course!). Drinking alcohol ranges from religiously required (as in my Catholic tradition!) to socially taboo (in some mainline Evangelical traditions) to religiously forbidden (in Mormon and some fundamentalist traditions) among Christian worldviews. So, we covered lots of angles. I left with an opinion that as alcohol lowers our inhibitions, we can somewhat discover how much of our faith is just inhibitory religious codes, and how much we are actually allowing our "true selves" (as Thomas Merton calls it) to be transformed to the life of Jesus.

It's not just a religious thing. We all know "sloppy drunks", "mean drunks", "emotional drunks", "tired drunks", etc. But alcohol doesn't make us mean or angry or sexist or emotional - alcohol removes other inhibitions we pile on top of those parts of ourselves. So here's the point - if I make a sexist comment while intoxicated, I'm sexist. (For whatever definition of 'sexist' we use.) If I'm sexist, that's something I need to change, regardless of alcohol consumption.

We need to improve as a community in lots of ways, with or without alcohol.

Can we put alcohol on the same level as caffeine?

Since I'm only making my rough observations and opinions, I don't have any specific suggestions for how we should handle alcohol at tech community events. Ryan makes some good ones in his post, there's a decent little discussion going on in Mozilla's engagement-developers list, and Rob gives some good general advice.

I very much agree with Ryan and Rob. I'd like to see alcohol as one entertainment among many at technology events. It can be an aspect of any event, but shouldn't ever be the main aspect of any event. I personally will always go check out the craft and local beers available at any event. (I make a habit to try to visit a brewery and a cathedral anytime I travel.)

But what I really want at these events, and what happens the vast majority of the time, even the "party" events, is to mingle with others who are passionate about technology - no matter what drink they're holding.

Tulsa Web Devs press tour

This Land PressOr as close to anything like a press release that we'll ever have. This Land Press ran a Government 2.0 in Oklahoma article and featured Tulsa Web Devs! w00t!

They also did a live stream from our Tulsa Hackathon event last fall.

Thanks This Land for helping us tell our story!

MDN 2.4.5

Late as usual! MDN 2.4.5 bug list and backlog.

Highlights

  • Wiki
    Syntax Highlighting
    KumaScript is in! (Though it's not available on stage9 yet.)
    Migrations are running on stage9
  • Bugs

Check the MDN 2.5 backlog for what we're pushing next!

MDN 2.4

MDN 2.4 bug list. This was our first 1-week sprint and release, so there's not as much to report.

Highlights

  • Wiki
    Nothing shipped, but Les filed the master bug for KumaScript - our replacement for DekiScript.
  • BrowserID
    Fixed lots of little bugs and enabled BrowserID for French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese locales.

MDN 2.4.5

MDN 2.4.5 sprint backlog.

  • Wiki
    KumaScript lives and I ran it successfully on my local environment!
    Syntax highlighting for code samples - both new and migrated
    Profile doc activity feed switched to Kuma
  • Some bugs

So, wiki work continues at a good clip and our process seems to be going well. We're changing our standup time to 10am PT since most of the team is CT or ET now.

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