Lessons learned in Scotland

I've now been working for five weeks at Picsel Technologies. The last two of which I spent at company HQ outside Glasgow, and the branch office in Edinburgh, going through training and meeting people. The group of new recruits I was with for the first week was very varied, with men and women of varying ages (I was most likely the youngest) and nationalities and home countries. All had very solid software engineering backgrounds though...

So far I'm quite satisfied with my change of workplace. Although I still only work with Japanese mobile phones, which is probably one of the most interesting thing one can work with, I now get to deliver to all the major operators, manufacturers, and platforms. The engineering processes at Picsel are pretty solid, and the quality of the software is sincerely impressive, which makes developing software there feel meaningful.

The training, on the other hand, was of more varying quality, but at least included some new and interesting material towards the end, even stuff worth putting in the resume. Scotland, however, is frankly one hell of a shit-hole, especially I suppose in December, and I wouldn't recommend anyone to set foot anywhere near it, which includes the whole of Britain, and possibly all of Europe as well. After a few years in Japan, it's hard to take the rudeness, impoliteness, and untimeliness one has to endure in the outside world.

The Days of Web Standards

As I mentioned before, I was going to appear at The Days of Web Standards, 2007. And as also mentioned, I was working on an ajax messaging library. I'm sitting here at the Days in Akihabara now, listening to one of the last presentations for the day. There's quite a lot of people here, and there's a certain conferency mood in the air. I have the W3C on my left and the Mozilla Corp. on my right. Got some nice Firefox stickers.

I combined the two mentioned matters and did a presentation and demo developing a chat widget using the freshly-released Ajax Messaging Library. Well, it's in early beta quality with many features planned but not yet implemented, but it works! Even on stage (except for a small bug, hehe). Anyway, it's out there now! I'll write more about it later.

P.S. I did the presentation in my socks; my shoes were drenched this morning by Typhoon no. 4.

CSS Nite Vol 19 Recap, and Sequel

As I mentioned in my other blog, I was going to hold a presentation at CSS Nite Vol. 19. Considering I haven't held a presentation since my university days (what the heck kinda company am I working for, really?), I think it went really well, and it was very fun to do. I've uploaded the slides as well - not that they're much to see in themselves. I did a demo constructing an Opera widget live on stage, and contrary to what one would have expected, it actually went quite without mishaps.

I'll also have a presentation on The Days of Web Standards 2007 on 14~15 of July. My presentation is on Sunday the 14th at 14:30. It'll be a bit longer and also on widgets (although this time too I'll try to sneak in as much talk about web application development as possible without Marketing noticing). I've got some pretty nifty ideas for a live coding session and demo... :) I hope someone will attend. Anyway, there are many very interesting speakers scheduled...