“The plan is to have all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things. I’m hoping to find fascinating people and to just ask them to speak about something they care about. I want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, musics, jokes and whatever.”

—Russell Davies, founder of Interesting

The format is quite cool – a smallish number of speakers give 5 minute talks, and the rest of the night is unstructured. The speakers are from quite the range of life and the topics look extremely thought provoking.

The basic conference elements were all good: it felt well-run, there was a good mix of people and the sessions were more-or-less mostly-kinda interesting. The conference itself was in San Jose, so… it was warm outside, I guess? We weren’t tempted to skip sessions because there might something more interesting to do? I’ll do breakdowns by category, going in decreasing order of importance.

Keynotes

I attended the opening keynotes on Tuesday, which started with Thomas Tague from OpenCalais letting us know that People With Money™ (my term for it) were about to descend on our sleepy semantic backwater. He was a good speaker, and his message was well-received. What I got out of his talk was that we (as software developers) need to figure out where we can succeed in this new landscape, that there are still a lot of potentially profitable niches and that opportunities for tool developers still exist. Tuesday’s second keynote was Tom Gruber from Siri, who gave a demo of their upcoming mobile “virtual personal assistant”. It was a pretty rad demo, and I’m very excited about the ecosystem of services that it might cultivate. Siri has the potential to be a killer app in both the mobile and semantic web spaces, and I’d love to see their execution match their vision.

I skipped the other two keynotes. One was a panel discussion; I find it difficult to get much out of anything in this format. The closing keynote was two gentlemen from the NY Times discussing semantic technology uptake at the Grey Lady. I probably should have gone to that one.

Sessions

I’m not going to go over every session,  because that’s a lot of writing that no one wants to read. The following sessions were ones I found worthwhile, so if you’re ever undecided about seeing these people, or say, booking them for your conference, you should just go right ahead on my say-so.

Elisa Kendall and Deborah McGuinness: Ontology 101 – a lot of content in this one. One of the key themes that I picked up on during the conference is that almost every way to incorporate semantic tech in an organization starts with understanding and developing ontologies. Another one is that you shouldn’t feel bad for thinking that ontologies are hard… there are people that devote a lot of time and effort to making them, and they still sometimes get it wrong.

John Hebeler and Matthew Fisher: Semantic Web Programming – loved this. It had a great format, with short lab-like exercises that got progressively more complicated; we started with building simple models in Jena, and ended with using the Pellet reasoner to infer new knowledge. It was so good and well-presented that I immediately went out and bought their book.

Dave Wood: Active PURLs – a great, no-nonsense introduction to PURLs and their in-development “active” variants. Dave, along with quite a few people at the conference, really came across as a true believer in the infrastructure of our current web. I had always thought people just made it up as they went a long, but no, a lot of thought and effort went into those early RFCs.

Random people: Visualizing RDF – this sort-of panel was sort-of organized on the spur of the moment. I’m glad I went, because I got to see AllegroGraph’s Gruff and someone else’s Diagramic. Cool tools, these.

Food

The catered stuff was quite good for conference food. I’m going to spread the rumour that, due to certain “economic realities” (*cough*recession*cough*), the turnout was less than the organizers were expecting, and so the catering budget (which had been decided per-head much earlier) was relatively high.

Outside the conference, found a few places in San Jose which might be worth going to if, like us, you didn’t rent a car and don’t have enough time to trek to San Fran.

Mezcal – featured mezcalitas (good) and pan-fried grasshoppers (less good). Get the lightest-coloured molé… best of their three.

Angelou’s – went here while on a burrito hunt. (To a Canadian, America is the Promised Land of the Burrito). I ordered their Super Burrito. It was Merely Okay (A Bit on the Salty Side).

Hanuman – ordered the curried duck (“Thai spicy”). It was fantastically tasty, but it was not Thai spicy.

Conclusion?

This year had a good mix of people from the business, acedemic and technical communities. As expected, there was lots of networking, not all of it involving Twitter or Cat-5. They say next year will be even more business-focussed, but since grad students love to travel, expect to see them too. And maybe us, as well.

Discussions spilled over to the pub for some follow up chats on Grails utilization, Eclipse’s Grails support as well as idle banter on the merits and pitfuls of agile development in its many guises.

Hopefully the talks sparked some interest and mark the beginning of more meetups to come in the year ahead. Our thanks to WorkSpace for providing their facilities.

Those interested can check out the slides and the sample code from my 30,000ft overview of grails 1.1 testing features.

Here are some photos to memorialize the day…

Upon conquering the Crazy Raven

Refuelling at the Crazy Raven Bar & Grill

Any day on the mountain is almost as good as a day in the office!

Man, that was TIRING...and it sure is comfy in here!

Serious retrospecting

Judi and Aaron jesting for the photographer

Hitting the slopes again after filling our bellies

We experienced what could best be described as an illuminating and transformational year at 2Paths.   From changes to our processes and tools to the diversification of our team demographic, to teaming up with some fabulous new valued partners and clients, change abounded.  And there’s not a soul among us who would argue that it wasn’t for the better.  As our year concludes, my 2008 retrospective blog finds no shortage of things to reminisce about.   Sit back and enjoy.

From a people perspective, the team welcomed 2 new babies into our extended family.  Congratulations to Michal and Lori on the birth of baby Cohen, and congratulations to Ricky and Lin on their second addition to the family, Lucas.  I personally bought a house and got married to the love of my life, Willy the caveman, in a small Whistler wedding. Garret married the love of his life, the beautiful Priscille, in grand fashion Winnipeg-style.  2Paths gladly welcomed new members to the team Omar Khan, Sandra Widjaja, Gary Meehan, Tim Oxenford, and. Kari Braaten.  And last, and very important – we celebrated Michal Urbanski’s 5-year anniversary with the company by sending him on kite-board lessons in Squamish.  He returned exhilarted and intact, thank goodness.

Processes and tools were areas that 2Paths focused heavily on in 2008, recognizing that these will differentiate us from our competition in the future.  We honed in on our existing skills by cultivating 3 certified scrum-masters (Lorill, Geoff and Omar).   Scrum (a brief daily morning developer meeting) has been pivotal to our successful software projects.   Someone likened it to inviting your mother-in-law to live with you – she may not fix everything, but she will most certainly point our everything that needs to be fixed.  Then it’s just about the fixing.    Next, the team continued to examine open source software tools and added some more to our repertoire, including Grails, Hudson, and Groovy, to name a few.   To ensure we got the latest on emerging technologies and uses of technologies, we also sent 2Pathsians to attend conferences on Geo-spatial technology, the Semantic Web, QCon (a conference of technical depth and enterprise focus), No Fluff Just Stuff, and Agile Methodologies.

In the spring, we moved our office to the Arthur Erikson Waterfall building by Granville Island from Gastown.   In addition to loving the view, we have been enjoying lunch at Go Fish, the NoodleBox, and Sushi Go, not to mention whipping up concoctions in our gourmet kitchen.  After our first pay cheque in the new location, our Synesso Cyncra coffee machine made its proud appearance in our kitchen providing java nirvana for everyone to enjoy.  There has been talk of a group membership to Caffeine Anonymous, but so far we’ve been holding out alright.

From a team-building perspective, we did a TON of fun things together this year.  Our long-standing tradition of playing together, letting off some steam, and laughing is our real secret to strong teamwork.  Here’s the illustrious list of our 2008 fun:

-    We bonded over some spring-skiing/riding at Grouse mountain, followed by beer on the patio in the glorious sun;
-    We learned to Curl at Marpole Curling;
-    We tested our trust in each other during rock-climbing;
-    We golfed at Gleneagles and BBQed at Judi’s new home;
-    We enjoyed some fine-dining at Chambar;
-    We participated in Bike to Work week
-    We enlisted a yoga instructor to lead us through weekly hatha yoga practices on the new roof-top patio in the summer, and in our boardroom in the winter.

One of our major projects has been with the “Insert name of international organization which we will shortly be revealing” on an application that has global impact and countless social good benefits.  It gave us an opportunity to go globetrotting to the likes of Paris and London.  Better yet, it presented a chance to work in concert with partners, Gagan Diesh and Kaaren Schulz of DesignStamp, http://www.designstamp.com/,whom we’ve grown to love and cannot do without.  We were also glad to continue our solid working relationship with our valued client, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, http://www.carlsonwagonlit.com/en.  And, we played pretend, and acted like a client to ourselves, dictating our own requirements towards an internal initiative which we will may be talking about a lot more in 2009.

So, as you can see we have been very busy this year.  Not just building web applications that make complicated problems palatable and bite-size, but also in being good to ourselves and to each other.   And we look forward to an exciting 2009, filled with market improvements, more work with our valued partners and clients, and at the very least, some good conversations, hopefully with you, over a fancy-pants coffee from our cool espresso machine.  Have a safe and happy holiday season, everyone!

2Paths Team

So, having just started working at 2Paths in July, I was pretty excited when I heard we were going to have a summer team event. When I listened to everyone’s ideas for a perfect team activity, I started to get a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. Things like hang-gliding, white-water rafting, rock climbing and mountain biking were suggested. Now these activities might seem average to you, but you have to understand that we have a pretty active team of people here at 2Paths who just love to be outdoors and on the go. We aren’t talking a bunch of beginner enthusiasts going out for a day of fun; instead we have a health mix of beginners, pros and those who will do just about anything.

Initially the plan was to head up to Squamish for a half day of rock climbing up a real mountain, however, despite weeks of sunny weather, we were in for rain on our planned event day. And the following day ended up being the day of the huge rock slide on the Sea to Sky highway which closed the highway for several days. So, being the flexible, easy-going group that we are (really?), we decided to head indoors to the Edge climbing centre in North Vancouver. After some initial confusion and delays, we were all outfitted to go climbing.

Now, I have never climbed indoors or outdoors, so I had no idea what to expect. A couple of days earlier, I’d learned that the word “belay” meant having someone hold your rope as you climb up and I’d also heard about “auto-belaying” which we were supposed to do. After watching a few people head up the wall (including a very talented 8 or 9 year old next to me), I gave it a go. I have to say it was actually easier than I expected provided I used my whole body and stayed close to the wall. Jumping down got to be fun on the auto-balays after a couple of tries. The team broke off into smaller groups with some of the more experienced climbers belaying for others. Some of the team also decided to go without any equipment on the steeper cliff faces using just their strength and some soft mattresses below. It was a pretty relaxed, quiet team event but we all got a chance to chill out away from work, and while we were only there a few hours, it seemed like we’d been there all day. Time actually slowed down for a while. Amazing!

Once we’d all headed up the walls a number of times and got our fill of climbing and sore arms, some of the team headed back to the office and the rest of us headed to the nearby Pemberton Pub for some cool beer and appies. For me, this part of the day was the best as I really got a chance to hang out and get to know the people on our team better. Plus the beer and food was pretty good too!

I’m not sure exactly what we’ll be doing for our next team event but I do hope that the planning goes smoothly and that the weather works for us and that we have more opportunity to do something ‘active’ as well as time to hang out and socialize. I’m in for anything provided there is a beginner version, except for maybe hang-gliding.

nice production work Geoff!

Most of us stayed together within the confines of a lovely condo within Whistler Village itself. This allowed for some more relaxed socialising and a distinct family feel to the weekend as we all got to know each other better. The weather was fabulous and the snow was in immaculate condition, being so early in the season. As a group, those of us more comfortable with the terrain managed to stay together and enjoy the skiing/boarding together which is sometimes rare with larger groups as the more hardcore lose patience and trail off to find their own powder moments.

The thing that struck me most of all, apart from the great conversation, excellent skiing and riding and all round good times, was the fact that in two days of constant interaction, we all managed to NOT talk shop. This indeed is something that I think highlights our abilities to gel as a team (and as people) in that it shows we can actually have interesting and constructive interactions which do not necessarily bare any relation to our work selves.