facebook During the insane array of things that have been/are going on these past couple days, I have neglected to mention that I'll be organizing another Unofficial Facebook Developers Meetup, this time in Boston.

The Facebook event can be found here, and I am thinking we'll be striving to grab dinner and drinks tomorrow (Tuesday, October 9th) in the Cambridge area since that seems to be central enough for everybody to come.

Zach Allia, of Free Gifts fame, myself, as well as a few independent Facebook developers have already RSVP'd, but I'd love to see as a lot more Facebook developers, or those just interested in the platform, come out and join us to discuss some Facebook platform related things, pick each others' brains, and throw back a pint of Sam Adams.

The venue hasn't really been decided yet, I'm debating between a couple different resturants in Cambridge, so if you have any suggestions, by all means bring it up. Regardless, if you're in the Boston area, come on out, it should be lots of fun.

mono Miguel de Icaza, one of my own personal geek heroes, just gave his brief "keynote" as part of Microsoft's partner talks component of the overall Remix Boston 07 keynote speech.

After previous demos being proudly shown for "working in Safari on Mac OS X, and oh by the way, it's PC compatible too", Miguel showed everybody up by pulling up the still very development version of Moonlight and dazzled a room full of hardened .NET/ASP.NET developers and designers with Mono's progress on the Moonlight project in a scant 4 months since the original "Mix Vegas" conference earlier this year.

If you hang around Miguel enough, you'll know how much he loves Compiz, which he used gratuitously during his demonstrations. The mixture of a good looking Gnome skin and Compiz really helped convey that "yes, Linux is here, Gnome is a fully-featured desktop environment, and check out this AWESOME CUBE EFFECT!" As a developer who's participated in the open source community for almost five years now, it was very inspiring to see a room full of Microsoft's battle-tempered third party developers pine to have some of the cool features that Linux has!

Some of the Silverlight applications Miguel demonstrated were Metaliq's Top Banana which ran surprisingly well, then Silverlight Chess followed by the Halo 3 trailer running (not streaming) on Miguel's Linux laptop. To invite further jealousy from the room of developers, Miguel fired up Firefox, running Moonlight, running the Halo 3 Trailer, on the edge of a "cube" workspace (such as this). Applause ensued.

Coming back to the topic of developing Silverlight/Moonlight applications on top of Linux, Miguel fired up MonoDevelop claiming that "we have one, I just don't use it; I have an allergy to IDEs." Much to my surprise, he then fired up Emacs to edit his local copy of Silverlight Chess, updating a property such that it returned "Mono" instead of ".NET" in the interface, dropped back into his X terminal and ran "make" like, quote, "real men do" (to which some of the crowd applauded and the rest laughed). Miguel then ran the SilverlightMoonlight Chess application and closed his keynote speech stating that:

"Your designers can use Expression Blend on Windows, but your real developers can use Linux to develop Silverlight."

Overall the keynote was very well done but it really seemed like Miguel stole the show after so much emphasis was placed on "Silverlight's portability" by really showing what the Mono Project is capable of, and that while Silverlight may work on Mac and Windows, Moonlight runs on the corner of a wicked cool cube.

mono miscellaneous software development After a grueling flight that started with a full-on sprint from the TSA security checkpoint and ended about a quarter mile through the terminal (in socks no less), I have made it across the country to Boston for Remix 07 Boston.

I'm still anxiously awaiting the keynote, and trying to find the Mono guys that are in attendance to try to learn as much as possible about the development and future of Moonlight, while simultaneously trying to learn as much as possible about how other developers are embracing and using Silverlight too.

If you're at Remix, come find me, I'm a San Franciscan in a rainy Boston, and I'm scared ;)

I'm this idiot, rocking my "business attire"

facebook I got off-stage just a few moments ago, but since Dave McClure already blogged about it, I would go ahead and post the source code so Dave could link to it.

"Why are you awesome?" source code

The version of the client that the code is using, is specifically for PHP4, you can just replace the client/ folder with the PHP5 version depending on your host settings. The source code also includes the database schema that "Why are you awesome?" expects.

Happy hacking, and add the app!

slide facebook In addition to posting the source code for the application I wrote specificaly for Graphing Social ("Why are you awesome?") I also figured I should post my slides from the two hour or so session, which was composed of much more discussion and suggestions from Ari Steinberg (a Facebook Platform developer) and myself on developing on the platform and some of the intricacies involved. Gary Lerhaupt did a good job of "live blogging (part one)" (part two) the workshop if you're interested in the play-by-play.

In theory there should be video soon so "stay tuned" (get it!) and I'll be sure to either post or link appropriately.

Regardless, I hope you can at least find the presentation informative if you couldn't be here.

Facebook App Development.pdf

In general I really enjoyed presenting and answering questions from some folks in the audience who were really keen on squeezing as much knowledge out of my pea-sized brain as possible. Unfortunately I can't stay for the next two days of Graphing Social, as I'm off to ReMix 07 Boston and some Silverlight hackery!

software development facebook As I previously mentioned, I'll be teaching a workshop on "developing your first Facebook application" tomorrow at the Graphing Social conference in San Jose. I figured, what better way to explain building your first Facebook app then to write one! Why the hell not right? So last thursday night I cleaned the dust off my pathetic PHP skills and set to work to create an application in a couple hours, that I could use as a tool for teaching the "basics" of Facebook application development.

Behold, awesomeness

Why are you awesome? is a relatively simple application that follows the self-importance of Twitter, but adds the "social graph", and voting capabilities. Using "Why are you awesome?" I hope to convey in a marginally basic sense some of the core concepts behind rendering FBML pages, making use of notifications/feed posts/invitations and Mock AJAX from the profile.

I won't disclose too much before the presentation (not that anybody will see this before the presentation), but I'm extremely happy with what about 4 hours of morning hacking has garnered me, and the possibilities of the application.

You know what, let's see that super-mega-hot interface one more time.

slide facebook As luck would have it, I'm currently masquerading as Max at CommunityNext in Sunnyvale. The underlying drive behind the entire event is to discuss some of the intricacies behind a locked-down platform like Facebook's. CommunityNext is interesting in that Noah Kagan, one of the organizers, did a really good job of finding, and bringing a lot of the upper tier Facebook Platform developers to Silicon Valley from Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, etc.

If nothing else, CommunityNext is rumored to have great parties, and there just so happens to be a BBQ later today down here in Sunnyvale. It's somewhat late to suggest that everybody I know to attend, so I'll just mention that you're missing some good fun in South Bay, and leave it at that.

mono miscellaneous
Turns out I'll be attending Remix 07 Boston next week but unfortunately my mega-cool-Silverlight hack won't be finished due to some scheduling complexities involved with working 130% of my time at a start-up in San Francisco (turns out, not too conducive to side-projects). I will be arriving bright and early at 6:30a.m. pounding down a gigantic (and expensive) airport coffee, and then heading to the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, so I apologize in advance if I look exceedingly tired Monday morning.

It'll be a great opportunity to get a feel for where Microsoft thinks that Silverlight is going, and how they intend to get there. It's a long hard road to even become near where Flash is in terms of market entrenchment, but Microsoft is one of three companies I believe currently capable of acheiving it (the other two being Adobe itself [bought Macromedia, they cheated], and Apple).

I would also like to give those Popfly guys an earful but I may spare them depending on how busy I am trying to find some fellow Facebook developers that live in the Boston area, or Miguel, who I'm pretty sure doesn't exist, but is merely a robotic creation of some wacky laboratory in Mexico.

If you'd like to meetup and have lunch, or a beer in the evening Monday or Tuesday, feel free to send me at email (tyler@slide.com) or track me down during the actual conference (i'm this guy).

Special thanks to Anand for what us young-folk call "the hook-ups" and I look forward to seeing both of my blog readers in Boston next week ;)

slide facebook presentation As one of the developers behind a big Facebook application or three (1, 2, 3), I've tried to share the love as much as possible. I can be found regularly on the #facebook channel on Freenode as well as in various tea lounges and bakeries. Through our Indie App Promotion in Top Friends and some other projects still developing, I'm trying my best to help ease the transition from web developer, to Facebook Platform developer as much as possible for my fellow hackers out there.

So, partially because my employer has been gracious enough to allow me, and because Dave McClure has given me the opportunity, I will be hosting a workshop at the Graphing Social conference in San Jose, CA, this upcoming Sunday.

The workshop is titled "Facebook App Dev 101: Intro to Platform / Building Your First App." In the first half of the workshop I'll cover some of the basics, with an introduction to the Facebook Platform, some Facebok Platform developer resources that are available, and then I'll touch on the various frameworks available for the Facebook Platform ranging from Facebook's PHP4/5 client library, to PyFacebook (Python), rfacebook (Ruby), and the Facebook Developer Toolkit (.NET). The second half of the workshop will cover building a sample application from the ground up, i.e. from setting up the developer version of the application as well as the live version, to writing a basic feed-postin', invitin', profile updatin' Facebook application in PHP and finally to running some basic tests and setting up basic metrics for the application.

Regardless of whether the workshop is recorded on video (it's going to be two, hour and fifteen minute, sessions, so most likely not), I'll be sure to post my "workshop materials" here after the fact. Hopefully they become as useful to novice Facebook Platform application developers as I hope my previous presentation "Coping with Success" (video) has been.

If you're in the Bay Area, I would highly recommend at the coming to Graphing Social as most of the bigger players on the Facebook Platform will be there, and it should definitely be an interesting conference, and if you're a developer who wants to get the scoop on developing Facebook Platform applications, be sure to come to the super-mega-awesome workshops we'll be doing this Sunday preceding the two main days of the conference.

Hope to see you there :)

opinion Where's the call to war to freedom for our fellow democracy seeking people in Burma?

Instead, we should start a war with a country begging for a reason to show off it's developing nuclear arsenal?


What the fuck.


My old life-goal was to get filthy rich and waste it on ridiculous stuff like a t-rex egg, but I think I'll just try to get really rich and start buying Senators.

mono opinion facebook I remember watching a Channel 9 interview about Popfly with my coworker and former landlord David Young just after the original Facebook F8 Platform Launch back in May, laughing hysterically at a user-interface that used grass as an interface element, but at the same time thinking it was a very cool use of Silverlight as an application platform, instead of a Microsoft reply to Flash. Since that fateful day in May when a Microsoft Vice President of Business Development unveiled Popfly (exactly who should be unveiling a developer tool), I've heard close to absolutely nothing about Popfly, but loads about Silverlight.

Waiting to build a new version of Mono from trunk, I figured I'd check it out again, hoping their ludicrous "private beta" period would have passed, and I could finally use the technology that was unveiled almost 5 whole months ago. Alas, despite having the Silverlight plugin for Safari, popfly.com doesn't support Safari (I thought people wrote cross-platform web pages these days). Admitting my defeat, I popped open my VMWare instance of Windows XP, and Internet Exploder 7, only to discover that yes, Popfly is still invite-only or they're having server difficulties? Despite their about page jokingly referring to themselves as the developers behind products like Microsoft Bob, I'm starting to wonder if they weren't joking, as Popfly's introduction at F8 was either woefully premature or Microsoft decided that a developer environment where you draw lasers in-between boxes that represent stuff is too silly.

All my criticisms aside, the product does look interesting enough for me to be excited about the Popfly session at ReMix Boston '07 in October, if for no other reason than to ask for an invite, and maybe even wtf?

Given the insane amount of buzz around the Facebook Platform, and independent developers struggling to get cool applications into users' hands fast enough, Microsoft screwed up royally on a chance to sow the seeds of the next generation of developers on the web with Microsoft technologies.

Dear 800lb Gorilla,
When you announce something at a tech event that could possibly turn out to be industry changing like the Facebook Platform Launch, actually have the product ready for people to start using, otherwise, why bother?

mono miscellaneous software development While catching up on about 2 weeks of Mono Subversion commit emails (about 1000), building Mono, and writing a new Facebook REST client library, I came across ReMIX 07 in Boston, which certainly looks interesting. I haven't been to Boston yet, and it'd be nice to at the very least, to try to buy Miguel and some of the Boston-based Mono team a beer, maybe to make up for some of my anger that sometimes blurts out into the IRC channel:

05:48 <rtyler> god [expletive-deleted] damnit, I'm going to beat somebody up

(Which, in all fairness, usually stems from some idiot mistake on my part)


The sessions on Silverlight by Adam Kinney, who I did this interview with, are definitely looking enticing, as I'm still trying to figure out if it's worth my time and effort, or if Microsoft is going to screw developers again (ActiveX for Mac OS anybody?).

Most of the sessions seem to be targeting web developers, which is a role I find myself increasingly definable by, despite my role being clearly stated on my business card:



Regardless, seeing what developers are doing off in la-la-Microsoft land should be interesting as most of my web development work is either in Python or ASP.NET(Mono).

I am a little disappointed in the lack of sessions on IronPython and where that project is heading; it probably lost out to mega-mind-boggling sessions like "Stop Building PowerPoint Backgrounds & Start Selling High-end Presentations", which means I would have to settle on "Just Glue It! Ruby and the DLR in Silverlight" for my DLR fix.

That said, will it be worth a trip across country and a couple of hundred dollars out of pocket? Any couches available in the Boston are? And of course, are Microsoft conferences that awesome?

facebook Rumor has it that there will be a little meetup in Palo Alto tomorrow to hack on some Facebook applications. The hackathon will be at Happy Donuts in Palo Alto, which is a hop skip and a jump away from the California Ave. Caltrain stop. I am planning on attending to hack on my Bug Tracker application (written in ASP.NET on Mono, which I will dissect and discuss later) as well as help out anybody that needs a good kick in the pants. Other than that however, it should be interesting how many folks show up and for what reasons, I'd like to discuss and share some of our sicker FBML hacks and maybe collectively play with (read: break) the Facebook Data Store API. Should be fun, come down and hang out :)

mono miscellaneous software development At the closing of SilverlightDevCampSF Microsoft Evangelist Adam Kinney did a brief video interview with me about my silly Silverlight hack. I had just started with Silverlight the night before, and didn't even have Moonlight virtual machine up yet, but I did have a Windows XP vm kicking around.

After the, roughly, three hours it took me to get Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Expression Blend, and a couple of other tidbits installed on my vm, I finally got to my Silverlight hack. Starting with something I presumed would be exceedingly simply, I created our "collage" transition in Silverlight (you can find a "sample" here).

The hack is relatively simple, a new randomly generated storyboard and canvas are created for each image, then added to the root element; after 15 images have been added the canvas is cleared and repeats. I used Silverlight 1.0, since that's all that is released right now, so everything is in Javascript (argh!), but I intend on revisiting the hack once Silverlight 1.1 is a bit more stable (and rewrite it in IronPython!).

Anyways, here's the interview.

mono software development At the SilverlightDevCampSF this past couple days, I discovered a couple things while hacking around with both Moonlight, and Silverlight.

The first of which was that I don't know nearly enough about Silverlight, XAML, and WPF in general (crap). The second of which, was that with WebKit on Mac OS X, any application that embeds WebViews inherits plugins that are installed on the system. Extending this idea further, WebKit can inherit plugins that are bundled with a Cocoa application (inside Application.app/Contents/PlugIns), woohoo! What this means, outside of a purely Silverlight-related context, is that you could theoretically bundle a WebKit-plugin with a WebKit-based application and just have that plugin purely application specific, or bundle up a WebKit application with different versions of Flash and Silverlight for testing purposes. Unfortunately, there are some issues with clicking through to the Silverlight canvas in an embedded WebKit view, you can still try it out inside an application, without having to install the Silverlight plugin and restart your instance of Safari.

That said, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Of course not, you're probably sane, but I'm not, so I'd like to introduce SilverSurfer 1.0, an embedded version of WebKit that loads in the Silverlight 1.0 plugin for Mac OS X. It doesn't install anything on your computer, so you don't have to restart Safari, or futz with plug-ins, this is especially useful if you just want to try Silverlight out and see what it's about without installing anything.

Running SilverSurfer

Visiting a Silverlight page in Safari

Visiting the same page in SilverSurfer

Complex Silverlight in SilverSurfer

I think it's a neat trick, the only downside is actually having to bundle up the entire Silverlight.plugin bundle with the application bundle to make sure you don't have to install it, but other than that I hope you can find it useful when trying out Silverlight, or just testing it in Safari!

mono software development A bit late to bring up, but later today and tomorrow here in San Francisco, "we" (using that term loosely) will be holding SilverlightDevCampSF, one of the first BarCamp-styled events that I'll have ever attended where I've not played a part in it's organization.

In case you're unfamiliar with BarCamp events, they're loosely organized meetups/conferences to which geeks flock to normally for the booze included, but sometimes for the technical aspects as well.

I'm showing up particularly for Kevin Marshall's session on "Silverlight Facebook Apps" for obvious reasons, as well as to try my best to enlighten my fellow developers on the joys of Mono and Moonlight (that last part might not work out, time permitting). Overall it should be fun, and I hope if you're in the bay area you can make it down to 1 Market St! (map)

In case you're showing up, here's what I look like:


I'm with stupid ^

miscellaneous I'm back in San Francisco, and I'm not dead.

That was one crazy-fast road trip.

miscellaneous After a few solid months of staying within the city limits of San Francisco hacking to my heart's content on a few Facebook products, my OpenMoko, some Mono libraries that I'm building, and other stuff I shouldn't talk about, I'm taking a break.

A friend of mine has taken my advice and is moving to the west coast now that she's graduated and is ready to see what the world has to offer outside of Boston. Part of my obligation it would seem as the giver of (fantastic) advice is that I will now help her drive 2,968 miles from Washington D.C., to Santa Barbera.

I'm debating buying a camera once I arrive in D.C. later today. If anybody has any suggestions for reasonably priced, good digital cameras, please let me know.

This should be fun.


View Larger Map

slide facebook I figured I'd go ahead and include some of the Facebook Developer Garage videos that were recently posted to YouTube, including ones of me giving my presentation.

Coping with Success

Part One


Part Two


And of course Dave Fetterman, the lead engineer on the Facebook Platform gave a good talk (preceeding mine)

From Facebook

Part One


Part Two


Part Three


In general it was a great event, both technically, but also in terms of networking and sharing knowledge and ideas we've all accrued through our work on the platform. Slide had a good showing in my opinion and I think we did a good job of offering up advice where we could in terms of scaling, technical "gotchas" on the platform, and whatever else we could offer up to the community.

Around 300 showed up this time around, I'm hoping closer to 400 or 500 show up for the next Facebook Developer event that's held in the bay area, but we'll see.

Videos courtesy of dalmaer

slide miscellaneous software development facebook Despite resisting the temptation to come on stage chanting "developers, developers, developers!" I think the entire Facebook Developer Garage - Palo Alto was great success. Application developers from (in my opinion) well over half of the popular applications on Facebook and a lot of independent application developers showed up and in general good times were had by all.



As far as my presentation went, I was apparently "a great speaker, spoke in depth about building apps thats scale." But in general the feedback was very good, and I spent most of the rest of the day talking to individual developers about short-term and then longer term growth and how to attack that from a developer's perspective.

Since I've updated the presentation, it's posted here again.

Coping with Success (PDF)