meshU, the workshop-oriented sister conference of mesh, took place this past Tuesday in Toronto. It sold out a few days beforehand, but with only four presentation slots and an estimated ~200 attendees, it had the feeling of a very small and tight-knit conference, big names aside.

Turning the tables

Avi Bryant kicked off the development track with a talk on relational database alternatives. Instead of getting too deep into the why, Avi focused on design considerations / best-practices when building an application on top of services like Amazon’s SDB, Google’s AppEngine, and Microsoft’s forthcoming SSDS (now in beta). He finished off with a first look at MagLev, a new Ruby VM (and Bryant / Gemstone joint), demonstrating two irb-like shells accessing the same global objects, complete with transactional support. Very curious stuff; more details on MagLev are to be revealed during Bryant’s upcoming RailsConf talk.

Managing great software teams

Afterwards I snuck into Reg Braithewaite’s talk on managing great software teams. I’ve been reading Raganwald for the better part of two years, and I’ve generally enjoyed reading his management-type articles, so I was looking forward to hearing him speak in person – even with Daniel Burka of Digg/Pownce fame presenting next door. Unsurprisingly, Reg is as a good a speaker as he is a blogger, and it felt like management and developer-types alike enjoyed his assortment of management anti-patterns, golden rules, and hindsights. You can catch his slides here, but despite being aesthetically pleasing, they’re hard to appreciate on their own.

Implementing OAuth

After lunch, my co-worker Taavi and I took in Leah Culver’s talk on OAuth, an open API authentication protocol. Her presentation was both introductory and yet very-technical, with fairly complex slides depicting a number of authentication interactions, complete with source code examples. With a dizzying number of token names and types, OAuth was perhaps the most complicated subject of the day, but Leah had a helpful hand; Flickr’s Cal Henderson, author and celebrity audience member, answered questions throughout (OAuth is largely based on the Flickr authentication model).

Thin and Rack

Last, but not least, Marc-Andre Cournoyer gave a development talk on Thin, a speedy event-driven web server for Ruby, and Rack, a web server interface and library. Marc-Andre coded up a couple of Rack/Thin examples while he presented, and I’m not sure what impressed me more: Thin, Rack, or Marc-Andre’s expert command of TextMate. It was a great presentation (with a hilarious introduction), so it’s a shame it was scheduled opposite Ryan Carson and John Resig, as the audience was minimal. Oh well; this subject would be better suited for a [Ruby|Rails]Conf, anyways.

So that wraps things up. From all the feedback I’ve heard, meshU was a pretty big success, and all indications point to a repeat event next year. Thanks again to all the volunteers, organizers and sponsors* for making it happen.

Disclosure note: FreshBooks is a sponsor of both Mesh Conference and meshU.

So much for that New Year’s resolution. Since I began micro-blogging via Twitter after SXSW, finding inspiration for a full-blown blog post has been tough. So, if you’re curious what I’m up to, I recommend following me there. If you’re looking for non-stop brilliant observations, however, be warned: my tweets are reserved exclusively for sarcastic retorts and lunchbox content reporting.

What’s going on this week

Switching gears, it’s looking like an interesting week here in Toronto. meshU kicks off Tuesday morning, which I’ll be attending along with the entire FreshBooks technical crew. Panel-wise, I’ll probably be sticking to the ‘development’ track, which begins with a talk by Avi Bryant on relational database alternatives. After mesh, DrupalCamp2 takes place Friday and Saturday, which FreshBooks is also sponsoring.