Koali blog

This year webdu went too quickly! While we did many many things, it was very sad to say goodbye at head back to Brisbane.

Day 0

We were seen off at the airport by my friend and godson. It made the wait for the fog delayed flight a lot more enjoyable.

Having a few spare hours, we caught the train into Sydney city so that I could pick up a HTC desire phone as they were sold out in Brisbane. My new toy proved very popular and even sparked Mark Mandel to get his own. I love it so far but will post more about my thoughts in another post. We then caught the train and bus out to Bondi beach.

At 6:00pm we gathered for Code Wars. Our QLD team, the Tane Coders regathered for the 3rd year of the competition. We won the first year, but the ‘last minute blues’ NSW team beat us last year in the final. Interestingly the final this year was between us and them again and we walked away victorious. I’ll post the code and puzzles later.

Day 1

[notes for day 1 conference sessions coming soon]

Day 2

My session was against some other popular sessions this year, that I also would have loved to see. I still got a lovely audience and some contacts who have also been battling with Accessibility on the flash platform. I’ve been prompted to put the presentation etc into an adobe dev net article so I will be posting some code and getting some feedback in the next few weeks.

[notes for day 2 other conference sessions coming soon]

After the conference, the Adobe usergroup manager’s got together for dinner. It was fantastic to catch up with those who I rarely or never see in real life.

Day 3-4

After getting to bed at midnight Friday night, I started Saturday at 5:30am and then finished at 2:00am Sunday. We hit the beach at 9:00 for our surfing lesson. I was really happy to manage to stand on the board (for a very short time) within the first 10min of my lesson.

The usergroup managers then got together for lunch and a meeting. It was great to have everyone together and we have some exciting things planned for Australia and NZ for our usergroups.

After wrapping up our meeting at 6:00pm, I collected my poor Andrew who had been left alone all day, and headed off to the webdu afterparty. As always, it was fun to catch up with all the speakers and organisers.

We had about 4 hours sleep before packing up and heading home. I’ve had a nap but think I will sleep very well tonight!

Another amazing year at webdu and I look forward to doing it all again in the future!

The day started with the Microsoft Mobile breakfast. They are starting up a service called ‘marketplace’ for windows mobile apps which is basically like the appstore for Iphone. Besides that, there wasn’t that much that was interesting.

Day 2 keynote was in 3 parts by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft about where they are going with their technologies. I honestly wasn’t that awake during the session but picked up some bits and pieces. Next I went to the google maps session. I sat up the back to listen to the stuff I didn’t know but also to check email and take a look at my trading cards. I pulled the trading cards I had collected and put together wednesday night and swapped a couple around. I didn’t even bother recalculating as I was more interested in the learning part of the day. Then I watched the session on pixel bender, which I had talked briefly about last year, but was nice to see the different ways to put it into flash and also how to use it in photoshop. I’m inspired to try to write some more filters for photoshop. Then was Mike chambers session on advanced air development. Learnt a few handy things that I’m sure will come up as problems in the future. And finally Michaels session on Binding, which was fantastic!

The wrap up of webdu is the final round table session. The panel made up of Adobe, Microsoft and Yahoo employees field questions from the audience and then try to answer as honestly as they can while following their companies marketing line. Then came the prize draws…
This year I handed in my trading cards without even calculating because I wanted to focus on the sessions. I thought I had about 300 and had hoped for maybe a prize in the top 10. Then the top 10-4 scores came up on the board and they started at 430 so I had counted myself out of the race. 3rd prize was announced, then 2nd and then first prize. I looked up at the big screen as I heard my name called out. Richard (who was sitting next to me) said he hadn’t seen anyone go as pale and then bright red as I did. First prize was an xbox360 elite with Project Gotham 4 and Gears of war!!!
An extra funny thing is that Zoe (another girl from QLD) came first last year, so now we have started something.

This photo was taken a little bit later then the announcement when I realised my name was still up on screen and I should take a photo.

I was given a whole range of extra cards so I’m planning to share them at the brisbane adobe usergroups.

So after about 3 hours sleep, I rose to face webdu day 1. Unfortunately Andrew couldn’t and ended up staying in bed all day. I was a bit worried because I had lost my voice and felt crap but some butter menthol and water and a lot of ‘I can’t be sick’ thinking, I was able to enjoy the day and got my voice back.

Down at registration I picked up my conference goodies including a pack of my own trading card to hand out to people who came to talk with me. A big thankyou to Kai and Minty who organised the game and who put me in the deck. The point of the trading card game is to collect all the cards and find out all the rules as each card has rules about the game or about another card. You can only submit 9 for the final score and the order they go in is critical as cards modify other cards around them. I have some extras to share with family/friends and fellow brisbanite geeks.

Before the keynote, the webdu twitter feed appeared up on screen while people sat on their phones posting messages to the twitter. I’m not geeky enough to have an internet enabled phone yet There were also some intros and a ‘how to’ for the card game. Unfortunately this year there were no nectarine webdu animations.

The keynote was from Adobe mainly on the flash platform. I’d known about most of it before, but there were still some interesting bits and pieces including catalyst.
I’m not convinced on the catalyst stuff yet but I guess I won’t be till I have a chance to play with a not a still in development build and put it through what we have to do daily. Mike chambers did show off some nice augmented reality demos. Basically, you have a piece of paper/cardboard with a distict shape on it. Your webcam then takes video and analyses it and places computer graphics where the distinct shape is.

I then spent the first session making sure that I knew my presentation, all the examples were there etc. I’m really happy my presentation was second because I could enjoy the rest of the conference. Getting up on that stage was very scary but once I got into it the butterflies went away. I had a few people come up to me throughout the day to say they liked my presentation (and that they learnt things) so I guess it went well. A big thankyou to Michelle for taking some photos of my talk.

I spent the remainder of the day and night talking to people and having a great time.

Day 0 was definately adventurous! There were some real highlights and real stressful moments.

Andrew and I both woke up feeling under the weather. Andrew was still pretty warn out from a family visit Sunday and to add to that, it looks like I picked up the cold going around. The heavy rain didn’t make getting up any easier, however we pulled ourselves together, got the last things packed and headed off to the airport nice and early since we weren’t sure of traffic. It was a pretty scary cab trip as you could only see for the split second the windscreen wiper passed by but the cab driver did really well!

So 12:45 came around for our 1:00 flight when the lovely anouncement came over the loud speaker to say our plane was cancelled and that we were to go pack up our baggage and proceed to the checkin lines. We got on the 4:00 flight, which left at 4:30. We were meant to be in Sydney at the codewars event at 6, but luckily we weren’t the only ones effected by the rain.

Flying through the clouds with the afternoon flight was amazing. Unfortunately due to turbulance, the seatbelt and no electronic devices was on for a while and therefore no pretty photos

I started to relax a little once we finally made it to the crown plaza about 6:30pm

A little description about code wars. 8 teams compete 1vs1 in knockout rounds. The first was a first past the post problem, the second a creative audience vote and the third a harder first past the post problem.

The tane coaders were up first!

Our problem was to solve a rot 14 cypher, which isn’t too hard, but when you have the pressure of the crowd and time… things take a little longer to process.

Our competing team realised that we were close and so tried to cheat by typing out the answer into a string.

We were still faster then the other team and got through to the next round.

After waiting for all the other rounds to be played (a couple of hours) our next challenge, I loaded up the laptop only to be greeted by a lovely boot error. The computer had crashed before I shut it down and I had left it. We swapped order in the competition to see if we could fix it. I was pretty stressed, because while codewars didn’t matter that much, my presentation was on the following morning and a laptop is kind of helpful to present a technical presentation with. Luckily I had packed the leather pack that came with my laptop that has all the installation CDs as I had to repair windows.

So with a working laptop, we stepped up for our round. The challenge was to build a carbon calculator for webdu in 15min. We used flash and drew pretty trees along with a couple of ‘interesting’ questions for the calculator. Our mascot also made a return. Our app and mascot vs a plain flex app won the audience over and we passed easily into the final round.

So at 11:00pm we finally got to the last round. Given this string “1012111023409050101240632200100201372191001001019110218010143071″ we had to find the least score path through the square maze. 0 being tiles you could not cross and the other numbers adding to your score. We got it into a grid and the functions to check to move left/right etc, when I realised that it was far easier on paper. About a min out from having the final answer using excel and paper, the other team solved it using python. Well done to ‘the last minute blues’ on their code wars win. Enjoy the trophy for the year!

We finally got to our hotel room at 12:30 to discover all our checked in luggage was soaked. I hadn’t thought of it, but they don’t cover the baggage getting onto the plane. I guess that is a lesson for next time…

And wins State of Origin…

Wednesday night was a code wars event arranged as the event before the webdu conference. We won the competition, along with the costume comp and the wooden spoon.

UPDATE: Here are the files for those who wanted them. This was written for speed not structure so please don’t follow them as best practice! The flash one was written purposely nasty to win the wooden spoon award.

Voting Candidate Source

Binary Decode Source

Our team mascot – (team mascot designed and built 5 min before going on stage)

On the QLD rocks theme QLDers took home many of the card competition prizes. Grats to Zoe who took out first place.

And the challenge is on! I’ve joined the Brisbane team to hopefully teach the NZenders, NSWelshmen and the rest of the nation that QLD can code. It is the same night as state of origin so that will add a bit of extra competition to the night.

Webdu Code wars