It’s been a while since I posted on my blog and there have been some interesting happenings in my life.
First, last week I finally passed my drivers examn. Almost 12 years later then anyone else, but still sooner then some other people :). To actually get a drivers license in The Netherlands now you first pass the examn, then the CBR (the goverment branch that arranges driver tests) sends your result electronically to the city databases. The next day you can go and request a drivers license at city hall, at this point you are still not allowed to drive however. I now have to way 5 days before actually getting my drivers license, but then a new danger will be on the road! 
I drove with a very nice organisation called ANWB which I can wholeheartedly recommend. I failed miserably on my first examn; nothing is ever easy 
Next up is Kings of Code. eBuddy actually sponsered the event, so pretty much every developer of eBuddy was there listening to the various talks. There were numerous interesting talks:
- Peter Paul Koch
- I missed out on most of this talk, but PPK had much to say about event handlers. He is quite a natural in giving presentations and everybody I talked to found it very informative (slides)
- Folke Lemaitre (Netlog)
- netlog.com is one of those sites you hear very little about but then you realise that half the world uses it. A community site much like Hyves or myspace, only not as ugly as those. Folke showed us how they handle scalability of databases and HTML caching. The most interesting part of the discussion was about how they utilized memcached to provide content caching and MySQL read offloading. A two thumbs up presentation from my part.
- Mark Birbeck (W3C)
- As a representative from the W3C Mark gave an insight into RDFa. I had a long discussion with him afterwards about the feasability of the semantic web.
- Nate Abele (CakePHP)
- This guy didn’t make a lot of friends during the conference. Apparently the current way to win souls for you PHP project is by telling people how messed up the project lead is for the other project. This talk also spurred a Rails vs PHP ditchotomy (as john resig so aptly called it). Not very productive I think.
- Nate Koechley (Yahoo!)
- The second Nate was awesome however. He talked about the performance of websites; many things were not new to me but the presentation was awesome nevertheless. I think a lot of the attendees went home with a lot to think about and hopefully it will lead to some better designs on the web.
- Open Source Pitches
- I didn’t attend most of the OSS pitches, so I have very little to say about this.
- Menno van Slooten (eBuddy)
- Menno gave a smooth overview on the history of web development and the need to give future web developers education in order to bring the skill level up to the next level.
- John Resig (Mozilla)
- I spent a fair amount of time talking to John before his talk about processing and some other projects. His talk was about choosing a Javascrip library by comparing 4 different ones. I didn’t find it very usefull, since I have very little to do with Javascript libraries, however a lot of people that I talked to who do have to choose found if very informative. John also showed a project called Sizzle, which he will release soon hopefully.
On a very happy note the Blender Foundation has released it’s second open movie project: Big Buck Bunny. Their website is quite overloaded at the moment, but they also put the movie on Youtube. Very funny and well worth the 10 minutes of my time :). Great job guys!