Logan Buesching

So whenever I try and tell my parents, friends, girlfriends… ok, (I’m kidding about the girlfriends part) about what computer programming is, what frameworks are, and generally, what I do while in school, it becomes rather hard. I realized this early as it’s difficult to explain recursion to a new student, much less impossible to explain recursion to your mom, so I have decided upon what the best analogy for relating to computer programming is.

The Car

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Bennett and I happened to head to BARCamp Chicago 2007 over the weekend, but we only ended up staying for the Saturday sessions. Being at BARCamp was very intimidating. Not often are you put into a single location with so many brilliant people. I really enjoyed my time there and hope I can attend the camp next year.

During Saturday’s sessions, I listened to Sean Johnson‘s talk on his opinions on startups and how to create a business model that supports your own life instead of your own life supporting your startup. It was a very interesting talk and had some insights which I had not thought of.

Later I listened into a talk by Tristian Sloughter on how to brew your own beer. That was fun and I learned a bit about the differences between brewing ales, lagers, and what exactly a lambic is. I know my roommate next semester at school has already looked into brewing his own beer which I will most likely help out when I go back to school.

John Quigley had a talk about Lisp that Bennett was interested in hearing. Unfortunately he had lost his original slides, which forced him to use a document which wasn’t really meant to be put used as a presentation. Still, it gave me a little bit of insight into a language which I knew just about nothing about.

Mike Mangino talked about ActiveRecord in Ruby. This was an interesting talk and one that I was probably most interested in when I first head about it as I am currently implementing an active record implementation into the MyEPICS 2.0 framework. Most of his talk was about Ruby’s technical implementation of ActiveRecord and how to dive into the Ruby code instead of a more general academic talk of the active record pattern. I felt it was hard for myself to follow along with much of what he was saying because I have never worked with Ruby, and the syntax is quite daunting for a new entry. Still, I was able to get that there is a lot of auto-magic that is put into ActiveRecord, which makes me happy as I have implemented a bit voodoo myself.

Overall, I enjoyed the talks, pizza and beer that was offered at BARCamp Chicago 2007 and will be attending when they do it next year.

I have been working on the MyEPICS 2.0 framework for creating a website to match roommates together. During this time, I was switching from the old layout, to a different look and feel. When the designing and implementing the MyEPICS framework, I tried to make it as modular as possible, and able to switch layouts easily.

The only big problem that I ran across was empty div tags. The author of the article does a good job of explaining exactly what happened, but doesn’t offer a solution. He may have lost 2 hours of his life finding the problem, but I lost 2 hours of my life attempting to find a solution. My solution was to add an <xsl:output> tag to my XSLT sheet, with a method of ‘html’, which then properly fixed the problem. No more were empty div tags consuming whatever was after them, and it adds a DOCTYPE declaration, which is a big bonus! Now the output passes xhtml strict.

I’ve been thinking about attending BARcamp Chicago. It would be about a two hour train ride but I think it would be a fun experience. It takes place near the end of June and they have around 50 or so people signed up.

Anyone else interested?

Philip Olsen has a short article on PHP [lack of] naming conventions.

Maybe ogo is the solution?