al3x in Austin, al3x in NYC

...in that order!

From Friday, March 7th to Tuesday, March 11th I'll be in toasty Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive 2008. I'm not speaking at SXSW itself, but my colleague Blaine Cook and I will be giving an informal presentation on where Twitter is going at BarCamp Austin III, probably on Saturday. Mostly, I'm going to SXSW to party and bullshit. Those seem to be the primary activities given my experience last year, so this year I'm coming prepared.

In April I'll be speaking at GoRuCo 2008, the Gotham Ruby Conference. It's a one-day conference on Saturday, April 26th, and I'm one of just six speakers (eep!). I'll be talking about Twitter from a code-first perspective. We've done our share of conference sessions in 2007, but I'm hoping to go a bit more in-depth with this one, particularly now that we're open-sourcing bits and pieces of our stack.

You can find information about my travels on Dopplr, which is now open to the public and a joy to use. I put my trips on Dopplr and on this blog because I'm eager to meet you. If you'd like to meet up in Austin or NYC to talk about Twitter, Ruby, social software, bitchin' records, whatever, drop a line!

Been to Belgium or Amsterdam?

I'm heading to Brussels and Amsterdam in less than two weeks, and I could use some suggestions. My travel-mates and I already have a wiki that's bursting with pubs, breweries, restaurants, bars, museums, and so forth. What we don't have is a lot of first-hand advice about what to see.

We have four days in Brussels and five in Amsterdam. The former is already somewhat scheduled, what with certain breweries we want to tour only being open certain days of the week. Our time in Amsterdam is wholly unscheduled, and that's where I could use more help.

I hope to blog a fair bit of the vacation, both beer-related and otherwise. Cheers!

Conference Burnout

C4[1] was a good time , albeit lacking last year's first-time jubilance. This year's conference suffered from a few rough edges: the wasted opportunity for a more productive (and less offensive) discussion on Saturday night, overlapping media- and marketing-centric talks, and Fake Steve's sick leave. Still, a good geeky time and way better than most conferences.

I've been doing the conference thing since I was a nervous little hacker kid going to HOPE and Summercon; about ten years. The last couple years have been particularly conference-heavy since the Rails community has taken off. I'm definitely starting to burn out.

Conferences are great when you don't frequently get an opportunity to hang out with your industry peers, but living in San Francisco is one big never-ending conference. It was decided that only one of us from Twitter will be speaking at RailsConf Europe in September, and while I'm disappointed to not be seeing Berlin, it'll be a nice reprieve.

As increasingly more high-caliber tech industry types turn to remote working, conferences are bound to change. One the one hand, people might feel a stronger need to meet up with their peers if they spend most of their time with family and neighbors. On the other hand, as online collaborative environments improve, a kind of cognitive dissonance could set in around having technical discussions offline. Still, people love to have a beer with folks they admire.

I'm hoping to maintain a conference moratorium until next year's South By Southwest Interactive. Again, that doesn't mean much living in the Bay Area, but I feel like I'm due for some purely recreational travel.

San Francisco: Thoughts for East Coast Geeks

Since moving to the Bay Area several months ago, I've been asked by East Coast geeks what I think of the place.  There is, at least for webby folks, the sense that it's just a matter of time before you do a stretch in San Francisco.  The sheer density of companies and projects is just too strong a pull.

Despite having spent several months here this time around plus a couple months when I lived here in 2005, I still don't feel like I have an accurate sense of all of San Francisco's neighborhoods.  I can navigate through some parts of the city, but far more of it is either hazy might-have-seens or pure mystery to me.  I won't, then, try to hold forth on geographic generalities and which neighborhood can beat up which other neighborhood's dad.  I lived in Hayes Valley when I first moved here because it's charming and has a good comic book store.  I now live in SOMA because it's two blocks from my office and depopulated enough to be unobjectionable.  I'm nothing approaching an authority.

The climate in the city itself is lovely once you learn the trick: always have another layer.  The temperature ranges from the high 50s to the mid-80s; this means you can get away with jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie basically all the time, which is fantastic.  People seem to wear whatever they want, regardless of the weather, and it's generally temperate enough to do so.  The East Bay is purportedly hotter, but I don't find myself there frequently.

San Francisco is not my favorite city.  I'm not in love with the place, and I don't expect to be any time soon.  It doesn't have the depth of London, the density of Tokyo, the freneticism of New York, the history of DC, or even the clever urban planning of Portland.  Most of the city smells like urine.  I don't want to spend the rest of my life here, by any stretch.  I'm here for work, and for the tech community.

If you're coming from a place like DC, you may wonder how the tech community could be a significant enough factor to base one's living decisions around.  The East Coast has nothing like what San Franisco has to offer the technically minded: essentially a never-ending string of geek social events, opportunities to mingle, network, and collaborate.  There may be User Groups and Bar Camps in all sorts of places, but the Bay is the hub, the nexus.

Just as you see famous actors and actresses just going about their daily lives in Los Angeles, so too are the superstars of the tech industry up close and personal in San Francisco.  The difference is that if you're here, you can probably talk to them and kick around ideas.  If you're working on a cool project, even better.  Collaboration seems to happen in the blink of an eye here.

As an example: there exists in the Bay Area a culture of bug fix exchange between the developers of various projects.  Quite frequently I've "traded" a fix or feature on Twitter for one on an acquaintance's application.  There's a constant backchannel of tweaks and shared knowledge, and you can tap into it if you're in the area and have something to offer.  Coders here are eager to share, and to improve through sharing.  There's a feeling of Open Source made corporeal.

The downside is that it's hard to get away from all that tech culture.  I went to a reading by a group of magazine journalists this past weekend and the evening's MC referenced Twitter in an introduction for one of the authors.  Web talk came up at dinner later that night; even the written word isn't an escape.  I'm starting to understand why, just as New Yorkers periodically escape to the Hamptons or upstate, San Franciscans head for the wine country, or Tahoe, or even LA.  It's all too easy to be narrowly obsessed with all the tech goings-on, caught up in the Bay Area echo chamber where every new release of every little thing is terribly relevant.  And no, going to tech conferences in other cities doesn't really count as getting away.

There's enough in San Francisco, tech community aside, to equate with any East Coast city I've visited.  Food is great and varied, there are plenty of neighborhoods to explore, sights to see, et cetera.  You won't be bored if you move here.  But I haven't yet found that thing that captivates one to stay, nor have I met anyone who's been here for all that long.  If you're going to move for your career, do it; do it yesterday.  Just don't expect to want to be here forever, is my advice.

My RailsConf Schedule

I'm flying from San Francisco to Portland at 0640 in the bloody morning on Friday, with the aim of being checked in to my hotel and at the conference by sometime during the opening keynote.

Thenceforth, you'll find the schedule of talks I'm attending at MyConfPlan. Supposedly, my colleague from Twitter and I are giving a talk on Sunday at 10:45AM, but as of yet we're not on the schedule. There's no shortage of good sessions, though.

If you'd like to take the pulse of RailsConf via Twitter, check out the visualizer we put together. Most of the photos in the background were taken by Timoni on our trip to Portland earlier this year. It's pretty hypnotic, so use with caution.

We've got dinner plans on Friday night, but nothing set for Saturday. As much as I'd like to stay and hit the breweries, I'm flying back on Sunday evening.

See you in Portland tomorrow!

When We're Moving, and Why

We’re moving to San Francisco on Monday, April 16th.

We pack our stuff (books and household items; all the furniture is being given away) into a shipping container over the preceding weekend. Then we get on a plane, cat stowed in cargo, and go. There’s an apartment waiting for us in Hayes Valley. We might actually be crazy enough to drive to the local Ikea across the Bay Bridge that same afternoon. If we don’t, we won’t have any furniture. Our stuff arrives a while later.

That’s the “when” and the “how” of this move. The “why” is, first and foremost and as previously mentioned, to work at Obvious. Twitter is growing rapidly and we’re a small team; trying to keep up with the other engineers from across the country, all the phone calls and brainstorming and small crises, is a challenge. I’ve more or less been living on Pacific time since working out there several weeks ago, and I’m tired of it. My head’s already there.

There’s a broader question of “why,” though, given that: a) I already lived in San Francisco once and b) Timoni and I really liked Portland, Oregon way more. The answer is more or less that there’s more in San Francisco, even if it’s not all better. There’s more neighborhoods, more weekend trips in easy driving distance, more people, more shows, more possibilities, more going on. More than DC, and way more than Portland. We really want a change, and San Francisco delivers on the change front.

It won’t be too long before we’re back to visit on the East Coast, though. More about that soon.

Two Days at SXSWi

It’s now the end of the second full day at SXSW Interactive. Some first impressions.

The logistics are basically fine. Even the wi-fi works most of the time. The conference center is somewhat confusing to navigate, but justifies/makes up for it in sheer immenseness. Even the most crowded talks have still had comfortable standing room.

The same can’t be said for the nightlife, packed like sardines on a Tokyo subway car. It’s great to get a free drink ticket or have access to an open bar, but physically reaching the bar is another story. There’s nothing cool about sweating, immobile, while desperately scanning the crowd for someone you might want to talk to, assuming they can hear you. I’d love for SXSW party planners to trade the underwritten bar tabs for bigger venues and book DJs who do more than fumble through their iTunes library, but I’m sure they’ve found a formula that works. Austin on Rails tomorrow night might be more my bag.

The panels have been very mixed so far. About half of any given panel of speakers are worth listening to, and the others range from ignorable to absurd. Individual talks have been stronger. Thematically, it seems that the tech/design fusion of the conference yields the least of both worlds; the tech content is rarely nitty-gritty, and the design material frequently veers from aesthetics into implementation. Unless the next two days are really stellar, I wouldn’t go back to the SXSWi for the content alone. But then, I didn’t attend for the content alone.

People are generally nice. There’s the usual offputting tech conference sight of packs of young white guys with know-it-all sneers, but corner one alone and they turn out to be decent people. Sneering white guy packs aside, there’s something closer to gender equilibrium here than any other tech conference I’ve ever been to. The web celebrity quotient is high, and it’s easy to see how years of SXSW attendance and reciprocal linking created the incestuous web/blog/social tech community that exists today.

Lastly, it’s really great that people really seem to be enjoying and thinking about Twitter. Wired says Twitter is ‘ruling SXSW’, and friends at the conference anecdotally agree. The site won a Web Award this evening, and I’m thrilled for Jack and the guys who’ve been working on it since its inception. It’s nice to be working on something that the community is so enthused over.

Totally Obvious

I’m happy to announce that today is my first official day as a full-time Obvious employee.

If you’re a frequent visitor to the About Us page on Twitter, you’ll notice that I’ve been on there for a while. That’s because I’ve been doing contract work on Twitter since earlier this year.

Our recent trip to San Francisco was in part to see if I liked working with the Obvious folks and vice versa. I definitely did, and Timoni and I will be moving to San Francisco in the near future.

I’m looking forward to continuing to improve Twitter. It’s been great fun to work on something that so many people are enthusiastic about. But more than that, I’m looking forward to working with the awesome people at Obvious. It’s a great place to be.

Next Week: San Francisco

We’ll be in San Francisco from Sunday the 18th to Sunday the 25th. It’s a business trip for me and a vacation for Timoni. We’re staying downtown, near MoMA.

If you’re in the Yay Area you’d like to hang out, let me know. We should be free in the evenings. I’m going to try to revisit old haunts and explore some new ones.

Portland

For previous travelogues on this site, I’ve broken up my experiences by day. That’s worked well for some trips, but I don’t think it would make for an interesting impression of Portland (besides, I was Twittering much of the trip from the chronological junkies). There was a fair deal of overlap in our activities from day to day, so instead I’m grouping our experiences by topic.

Climate

I’d never been to the Pacific Northwest before visiting Portland. It would’ve been nice if someone had told me that there’s a place that’s not too cold, not too hot, not too moist, not too dry, and with a reassuring alternation from grey skies to brilliant sun during the day. Portland in February was some of my ideal weather, brisk but not uncomfortably cold. We left our heavy winter coats back in DC and didn’t once wish for them. A squirt of rain on Saturday didn’t even warrant an umbrella.

Geography

Portland spans the gray-blue Willamette River and is set between sizable, almost mountainous hills. Our hotel was on the East side of the river, by the Convention Center. To get to the more happening Northwest and downtown areas, we crossed the two pedestrian-friendly Steel and Broadway bridges a fair number of times in our short stay. We found the city so walkable, in fact, that we never once used the ample public transit, and took a cab only to get to the far reaches of the Southeast quadrant. That cab trip showed us the expanse of the city, easily missed if one confined oneself to the urban attractions of the Northwest part of the city.

Architecture + Urban Planning

Portland is known for its thoughtful urban planning, from effective use of gridded one-way streets to encouraging mixed-use development. All that planning has paid off. The city is, to a newcomer, eminently attractive and easy to navigate. In Northwest alone there’s a nice mix of older brick warehouses and office buildings, towering glass and steel office buildings, low-slung storefronts, and shiny new condos. The suburbs have an interesting mix of architectural styles; some of the homes look very California, and some remind me of the East Coast.

Walking around, we joked that there’s a city-wide committee dedicated to telling building owners precisely what tasteful color of paint they should employ. There’s hardly a block we passed that wasn’t a perfect palette of shades and hues. The best example of this was in the Pearl District, Portland’s testimonial to “urban revitalization” (read: bringing in artists and people with enough disposable income to buy art to fill renovated warehouse space). The Pearl is, for all the “yuppification” accusations, a lovely neighborhood full of developments that stand together nicely.

Attractions

We decided to walk to the Japanese Garden, which is nestled atop a comically big hill. It’s worth every step, though, as it truly is one of the most beautiful gardens I’ve seen outside of Japan. I’m pretty sure I could’ve stared at the waterfall all afternoon. The whole experience was a mental massage, and we left clear-headed and relaxed. Down the hill we made a

The Portland Art Museum was outstanding. Coming from DC, my expectations of a museum are somewhat inflated. Portland may not be able to match the sheer scope of DC’s cultural offerings, but their museum collection makes up for its size in diverse and intelligent curation. Both the classic and modern wings had great pieces complimented by well-written and thorough information. Timoni even found pieces in the modern collection she actually enjoyed, and that’s saying something.

The Chinese Garden wasn’t nearly as impressive as its Japanese counterpart, offering architecture and objects over carefully manicured natural settings. Too short an attraction to warrant its asking price, but convenient to downtown.

Powell’s is really an attraction all its own. We spent easily two hours lost in the stacks of the main store, and another hour in the nearby technical store. Le sigh.

Food

Ah, the food. So. Many. Good. Meals.

Southpark does a lunch that’s both elegant and hearty. Try the dates as an appetizer. Close to the Portland Art Museum.

Voodoo Donut is actually kind of a creepy little hole in the wall and the donuts are smaller that you might expect but damn good. We tried some traditional styles and a highly unorthodox Tang donut, all of which worked out just fine. Crap coffee, but it’s cheap.

The Everett Street Bistro stops serving brunch at 11:30AM. We learned this the hard way. They redeem themselves handily with a delectable menu that includes three different kinds of quiches, each distinct in texture and flavor. Excellent carrot cake, too. Wish we had gone back to try the rabbit ragu.

Sin Ju seems like, well, sushi for white people. Even most of the sushi chefs aren’t Japanese. Damned if all that matters, though, because they serve up great traditional offerings and nouvelle creations alike. Apparently it’s reservations all the way for a table at dinner, but we had a lovely meal and nice conversation with some locals at the bar.

Bluehour does an excellent Sunday brunch. I had smoked fish on a malt bagel and a chocolate chip pistachio scone that were both excellent. Our hostess and waiter were both charismatic and quirky, and nice balance to the restaurant’s hip-cum-swanky setting.

Drink

Portland has a reputation as a beer and as a coffee town. These are definitely deserved.

The Rogue pub is a friendly place, with a smallish bar area and a large dining room. Between the two of us we had their Oregon Golden Ale, Honey Orange Wheat, Morimoto Soba Ale, Chocolate Stout, Hazelnut Brown Nectar, and something I can’t remember (solid testimony). The Chocolate Stout was actually served in ice cream float form, an absurd decadence that I totally recommend.

The Horse Brass Pub came recommended by DC’s local beer wonderland, The Brickskeller. It certainly doesn’t compete with the Brick’s giant beer list, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. An excellent selection of taps and solid British food.

Stumptown Coffee also came with a high recommendation, described as some of the best in the country by a friend who should know. Not only does their drip coffee rival high quality French press brews, it’s a single solitary buck for a mug. What’s more, they have a great selection of Belgian beer when you’ve had enough joe for one day. Essentially heaven.

We wanted to try Henry’s 12th Street Taproom for its one hundred beers on tap, but it was a hectic, disorganized mess when we showed up on an early Thursday evening. I don’t mind a wait, but having to hover over other diners in an attempt to snipe a table seems far too uncivilized for a self-styled beer place that serves sushi. A cab driver later confirmed our suspicions.

Sip and Kranz seems to be popular with moms in the Pearl. I don’t know which came first, the moms or the play room, but it’s actually kind of charming that such a sleek, modern cafe plays perpetual host to a horde of toddlers. We had tasty Stumptown coffee, pastries, and breakfast food at Sip and Kranz, but their French press is overpriced, meagerly sized, and incorrectly timed.

Comix!

Timoni and I are, as you might have guessed from the description of Powell’s, book people. More specifically, though, we are comic book people. While Powell’s does surprisingly well in the comic department, nothing beats an indie shop. Floating World Comics opened a mere three months ago, but has a superb selection and a funky atmosphere. Or if zines are your thing – they’re sure as shit not mine – there’s Reading Frenzy, which also stocks a few proper (non-whiny art school crap) comics. I’m trying to remember the name of a niceish shop that was half comics + alt-books and half smut but it escapes me.

People

Four days is hardly long enough to get a sense of the local culture, but Portlanders seem a friendly sort. I had a guy ask to shake my hand for ordering his favorite Belgian beer. Our cab drivers were chatty, helpful characters eager to muse on the virtues and villainies of various neighborhoods. Waiters and shop keepers were cheery and helpful. Portland people seem nicer than average.

Conclusion

For the first time in ages I found myself sorry to be home at the end of a vacation, a feeling that not even London could muster. Portland seems an eminently livable city, relaxing without sacrificing culture and character. It’s not a city of particular consequence, but that’s liberating and, in a way, inspiring. Portland has clearly been a playground for testing out ideas of what a city could be. I think it could be a great place to try out a more rewarding day-to-day life on a personal level. Regardless, it’s a fine long-weekend vacation.

Portland

We’ll be in Portland from Thursday morning through Sunday evening. If you have any favorite must-see spots, do leave a comment.

Everyone seems to love Portland. I’m hoping it lives up to the hype.

Attending: RailsConf 2007 in Portland

I just registered for RailsConf 2007 after some internal debate about whether or not to attend.

Ultimately, my decision was, as with SXSWi, a social one. There are tons of interesting people in the Rails community attending that I’ve corresponded with, or read, or used code from. The opportunity to chat, kick around ideas, and buy much-deserved drinks is just too good to pass up.

If you’d like to meet up, please email me, or ping me on the RailsConf 2007 Conference Meetup registry.

I’ll be flying in later in the day on Thursday, attending the sessions from Friday through Sunday, and flying out Monday morning. I’m staying in the nearby DoubleTree, in what I’m told is a fabulous smoking room if you just spray a little air freshener about (yuck).

See you in Portland! (We’re also going to check out Portland next week, so I might see you then, too!)

Attending: SXSW Interactive 2007

I just nailed down my flight, hotel, and registration for South by Southwest Interactive 2007 (SXSWi). I’ll be there Saturday through Tuesday, strictly for the Interactive portion of the conference.

SXSWi has come recommended to me for some time, but the wishy-washy content of many of the panels and keynotes never sold me. Over the years I’ve realized that what everyone says about conferences is true: it’s not about the content, it’s about the conversations between talks.

I’ve also come to grips with my preternatural affection for the social end of the technology field, and SXSWi is the foremost gathering place for that scene. I’m not really certain if I’ll be able to get through four days of talks like “Web 2.0 / 3.0 Arts Entrepreneurship: Make Your Passion Your Profession” and “Parent Bloggers 2.0: Can ‘Diaper Diarists’ Make Real Dollars?” with my patience intact, but I’m looking forward to meeting the people who make the social web happen.

If any readers are attending or know somebody nice who is, please do comment.

Frontiering

Timoni and I will be in the midwest as of this evening, visiting her family for the holidays. We return on December 29th.

I’ve been told that everything from the landscapes to the people are depressing. It will be bitterly cold. But, on the upside, our week is essentially composed of driving from one holiday meal to the next. I am not concerned.

Flying, then, to the flyover states.