Montreal Tech Watch

JF Couture, Fred Brunel, Chris Lamothe, Mehdi

Monday 27th August was the 3rd Edition of Montreal Web Dev Book Club, a monthly gathering where web designers, entrepreneurs and web developers talk about recent books they have read and also current issues of the web. Here’s is my report:

• The first book was Building Scalable Web Sites, by Cal Henderson, lead developer of flickr.com. He shares with the reader how to design, develop, deploy and monitor a rapidly-growing website. It’s noteworthy that flickr uses Linux boxes, php, apache, mysql and memcached. Cal advises to get and use standard solutions, and never try to get exotic configurations in order to get that extra 10% speed for instance. It’s much wiser to get a standard linux distribution, standard hardware, and accept the fact that some of them will fail in the near future. You have just to make with it, ie design backup and rollback plans that provide transparent service to the user. It’s a useful read, if you don’t know yet how to manage a high-traffic website, but I found the first chapters were out of focus. The “tasty” content is on chapter 9, filled with tips and recipes from the “battlefield”.
• Fred Brunel talked afterwards about a e-book, Scrum and XP from the trenches, by Henrik Kinberg. He already has a post on his blog about it. For me, it’s the first time I heard about Scrum. It’s actually an agile development method, born from Nokia’s R&D product centers, with the author talking about what works and what doesn’t in “real” projects (as opposed to books exposing theories on project management), much alike the book by Cal Henderson. From what I understood, development “cycles” are first discussed closely with the product owner and the developers, on what can be done in 3 weeks. Because the development team are involved in this planning phase, the development is much more likely to hit its goals in the 3 weeks timespan. The process is then repeated for another “cycle”.
• Chris Lamothe, a Java developer for Desjardins, read afterwards Textmate, Power Editing for Mac, by James Edward Gray II. What I found interesting is that he compared his experiences with Intellij Idea and Eclipse. For Chris, Textmate was a rather puzzling experience at first, mainly because of the keyboard mapping, but the book was helpful, with simple, straight-to-the point tips and advice on the different Textmate features. It lacks though a keyboard map as a reference. Jean-Francois Couture also read the book, and has given his thoughts on his blog. Note: for rails developers, you may want to have a look at NetBeans, which seems to raise the bar quite high recently.
• Mehdi, a new comer to the event like Chris Lamothe, talked about Agile Web Development for the Web, by Dave Thomas and DHH, a book that was already introduced at the last edition. He is eager to learn Rails and I think this was the right book for him.

As usual, there were many discussions on current issues on the web, also about the current technology scene in Montreal, which I found as (if not more) interesting that talking about the books. Expect a follow up about this on mtw.

For the next issue, please leave a comment here. If you have a book, you should also leave the title. The yulstart wiki was used previously, but I found that some didn’t like having to register to be able to modify the page.

Next event is planned 7pm 24th of September, at Laika, 4040 bvd St-Laurent.

Quick recall:

• everyone is invited, regardless of the language you speak,
• it’s not a requirement to read a book, although you are expected to discuss and give your feedback on current subjects and issues,
• it turns out that most of the time programming and web development books are presented here, but every topic is welcomed. So for the next event, I will read Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte.