CodeRage, Road Rage, Airlines, and Flying

(...and things coming down the pike...)

I got up dairy-hours early this morning, to check out CodeRage, the Delphi ( / CodeGear / was Borland Developer Tools Group) conference online.  I'm really glad I did.  (...and, just for the record, CodeGearians, I'm glad it's a virtual conference this time around).

CodeGear has got some great things cooking up there in Scotts Valley.  The brief preview of Delphi for PHP looked quite promising (interesting side note: the VCL for this product will be open source), and Delphi 2007 for Win32 looked great too.  It was almost funny how careful they were trying to be when talking about (and not talking about) coming products.  There’s a lot more in the pipeline than what you can see right now; over and over you could just feel it.  (Why, for instance, did “Introduction to Ruby on Rails” just show up in the sessions agenda, along w/a Rails session track).

I missed much of the opening sessions and keynote, as did a lot of other (i.e. most) folks, due to CodeGear practically sucking the bandwidth out of Scotts Valley.  I could feel their pain, and thought of various conferences I’d been to that had technical problems almost "break the show."  I thought they did an admirable job of triaging the thing, and followed along fine as they led us through the virtual equivalent of “Let's go to another room where the audio/video equipment is working.” 

I'm absolutely glad I participated.  Got some direct questions answered too, during the Q&A sessions.

One thing I was noticing when the bandwidth went south, was just the behavior of people and “the crowd,” amidst the unanticipated / less-than-desirable technical circumstances.  Some people were chiming in with feedback on how things were coming through (“No sound in Minnesota.” “OK here in Germany.” “No video in Venezuela.” etc.), which largely seemed well-intentioned, and sometimes not so well-intentioned; but it was fascinating seeing the immediate feedback of 300+ person chat room come to life with comments from attendees literally all over the earth, gathered in realtime.  (...for something other than a video game....<g>).

The other thing, though, about that crowd, was how some people lightened up the place, while others were caustic like acid, or heavy like lead.  At one point, some folks were doing the chat-room equivalent of pulling out the beach balls between sets at a music festival; others were inviting their “neighbors” over for some conversations; still others were just patiently waiting; and then, of course, there were the loudmouthed few who were just complaining and grumbling, ready to immediately judge as incompetent and careless the folks who’d put out all the effort trying to bring this thing together.   I was thinking to myself, ”I think I’ve seen all these people at every single conference I’ve ever been to.”   

I remember reading sometime back, in some business book, about how they supposedly used to interview prospective flight attendants at, I think it was Southwest Airlines:

Part of the interviewing process involved gathering a group of the prospective hires in a small classroom-like setting, and having each of them present something to the others.  I don’t remember what the topic was or how they chose it, but the part I do remember, was that the people doing the hiring weren’t watching the presenters – they were watching the audience. 

What they'd found was that people who were empathetic and encouraging to those who were presenting (visually / non-visually / through words, or just facial expressions), were usually the best, as flight attendants, at keeping all the passengers settled and happy on the plane when in-flight.

I thought about that this morning, and I thought to myself, “Man, these guys deserve a pat on that back.  I can only imagine what they're going through back there.” (You could even hear little bits every once in a while, as they went from Plan A to Plan B, right on through to Plans C and D; I remember one classic moment was when they remastered a video which had inexplicably decided to loop after four minutes.  It's sitting there, crunching on that machine, remastering....  27%....50%.... 64%....  I’m sure they were just beside themselves, thinking “Compile, damn it!.. compile!...”     ...and then the video came out, and it didn’t have sound.  At that point what could you do but just laugh?  Man, some days are just like that.

But they pulled if off, and frankly, the cranky folks who left early missed out.  Not just on the video and the presentations – those will be online next week -- and some fabulous Q&A sessions; I think they missed out on a whole lot more than that...  an allegorical moment in Delphi’s history, I’d even say:  It was an Apollo 13 morning, and the engineers figured out how to get the carbon dioxide scrubber working again. 

There's an energy to this company like I haven't felt in years from them.  You can feel the oxygen filling up the room.

CodeGear: You're off to a great start.  Keep picking the kind of folks you’ve obviously got working there now, and the passengers will settle in just fine.

Eveyone else: "Please fasten your seatbelts."

Comments

[BTS]

We really appreciate your comments and feedback. As I was staying out of the way of David's team, I did not see it all go down. As always the team came through and made something great come off in spite of a little difficulty. I am looking forward to everyone seeing the same commitment and passion come through this year in our tools.

[Nick Hodges]

Cass --

Wow, great review. Fun to see you comment on the remastering of the VCL talk -- I was one of the guys sitting there screaming "Come on, Compile!!!" at the Camstasia machine. ;-)

Great stuff, thanks.

Nick Hodges
Delphi Product Manager