As previously mentioned, at CodeMash 2012 I gave a very silly Pecha Kucha talk entitled "Coding in the style of Glee". The video is on YouTube, or can be seen embedded below:

(There’s also another YouTube video from a different angle.)

This post gives the 20 slides (which were just text; no fancy pictures unlike my competitors) and what I meant to say about them. (Edited very slightly to remove a couple of CodeMash-specific in-jokes.) Don’t forget that each slide was only up for 20 seconds.

Coding in the style of Glee

As you may know, I’m from the UK, and it’s wonderful to be here. This is my first US conference, so it’s great to be in the country which has shared with the world its most marvellous cultural output: the Fox show, Glee.

At first I watched it just for surface story – but now I know better – I know that really, the songs are all about the culture and practice of coding.

(It isn’t easy) Bein’ Green

When I started coding, it was on a ZX Spectrum, in Basic. It was hard, but the computer came with a great manual. I later learned C from a ringbinder of some course or other – and entirely failed to understand half the language. Of course, this was before Stack Overflow, when it was really hard being a newbie – where could you turn for information?

Getting to know you

Over time I became semi-competent in C, with the help of friends. But learning is a constant process, of course – getting to know new languages and platforms is just part of a good dev’s life every day.

Learning itself is a skill – how similar it is to getting to know small children, I leave to your imagination.

Man in the Mirror

Glee doesn’t just talk about the coding experience, of course – it talks about specific technologies. This Michael Jackson song is talking about reflection, of course. Although the idea wasn’t new in Java, it was new to me – and now it would be almost unthinkable to come up with a new platform which didn’t let you find out about what was in the code.

Bridge over Troubled Water

Another technology covered beautifully by Glee is the interop. We’re in a big world, and we always need to talk to other systems. Whether it’s over JNI (heaven help you), P/Invoke, SOAP, REST – whatever, I hope next time you connect to another system, you’ll hear this haunting Simon and Garfunkel melody in the background.

I will survive

And who could forget persistence frameworks. I’m not sure whether Gloria Gaynor had Hibernate and the Entity Framework in mind when she sang this, but I’m utterly convinced that the Glee writers did. When you submit your data, it’s just got to survive – what else would you want?

You can’t always get what you want

We’d all like perfect specifications, reliable libraries, ideal languages, etc – but that’s just not going to happen. It’s possible that of course you won’t get what you need – even if you try real hard. But hey, you might just.

Lean on me (or Agile on me)

(I didn’t actually have notes written for this one. Copied from the video.)

Glee sympathizes with you – but it also have a bit of an answer: lean on me. Lean and agile development, so we can adapt to constantly changing specifications, and eventually we will have something that is useful. Maybe nothing like what we initially envisaged, but it will be something useful.

Losing my Religion

Of course, we don’t always stay in love with a platform. I’d like to dedicate this slight to Enterprise Java. Fortunately I never had to deal with Enterprise Java Beans, but I “enjoyed” enough other J2EE APIs to make me yearn for a world without BeanProcessorFactoryFactories.

Anything Goes

Now I’m pretty conservative – only in terms of coding, mind you. I’m a statically typed language guy. But Glee celebrates dynamic languages too – languages where really, anything goes until you try to execute it. Even though I haven’t gone down the dynamic route myself much, it’s important that we all welcome the diversity of languages and platforms we have.

Get Happy

Along with the rise of dynamic languages, we seem to have seen a rise of happy developers. We’ve always had enthusiastic developers, but there’s a certain air about your typical Ruby on Rails developer which feels new to me. Again, I’m not a Ruby fan myself – but it’s always nice to see other happy people, and maybe one day I’ll see the light.

Bust your Windows

I don’t know what I can say about this song. Do the Glee writers have it in for Microsoft? I don’t remember “Bust your OSX” or “Bust your Linux” for example. Only Windows is targeted here.

The Safety Dance

One big change for me since joining Google is increased awareness of the need for redundancy – the intricate dance we need to perform to create a service which will stay up no matter what. Where redundancy is a dirty word in most of industry, as developers we celebrate it – and will do anything we can to avoid…

The Only Exception

… a single point of failure.

(Yes, that really is all I’d prepared for that slide. Hence the need for improvisation.)

Telephone

(From video.) Glee celebrates the rise of phone apps. Who these days could be unaware of the importance of the development of mobile applications? And obviously, we can credit the iPhone for that, but since the iPhone, and just smart phone apps, we’ve also started…

U Can’t Touch This

(From video.) Tablets! And touch screen devices of all kinds. So Windows 8 – very touch-based, and sooner or later we’re all going to have to get with it. I don’t do UIs, I’ve never done a touch UI in my life, I have no idea how it works. But clearly it’s one of the ways forward.

Forget You

As smart phones and tablets become more ubiquitous and more bound to us as people, privacy has become more important. Glee gave us a timely reminder of the reverse of the persistence early on: we need to be able to forget about users, as well as remember them.

(A)waiting for a girl like you

(From video.) I’d like to leave on an up-note, so: I’m clearly very, very excited (really, really excited) about C# 5 and its await keyword so I ask you – I beg you – be excited about development. And always bear in mind your users.

My life would suck without you

Users rule our world. Can’t live without them, can’t shoot ‘em.

Celebrate – we do stuff to make users really happy! This is awesome! We should be thrilled!

(Even for enterprise apps, we’re doing useful stuff. Honest.)

Don’t stop believing

(From video.) So to sum up: have fun, keep learning, really, really enjoy what you’re doing, and… don’t stop!