[Glyph-discuss] Metaphysical Toaster

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

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I have been traveling a lot this past month.  I'll have photographs up 
a little later, but I've been waiting to write up these experiences for 
far too long.

First, at the beginning of March, I went to the Game Developers 
Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California.

It was an interesting conference in more ways than I can talk about on 
my weblog: game developers are fond of informal NDAs :-).  I got to 
meet with Brian Warner and Donovan Preston while I was out there, which 
was fun.  However, California (or at least Silicon Valley) is like 
outer space.  It was really a horrible place to do anything but have a 
conference; I did absolutely nothing tourist-like and couldn't even 
manage to get a cup of coffee on a saturday.  (Starbucks that *doesn't 
open on weekends*?? What were they THINKING?)

As to the conference itself: it is encouraging to see that the industry 
as a whole is repeating the same mistakes that it was making three 
years ago, when I was better connected to the grapevine.  There is 
still no appreciable respect for gamers outside of what must be the 
poorest market segment in the universe (14-18 year old males who like 
D&D).  As far as I could tell, there was no attempt to make games or 
high-level game infrastructure that were flexible enough to be 
customized for micromarkets (stamp collectors, curling fans).  
Similarly, there was no interaction with, and almost no awareness of, 
the open source community.	

The one concession to sensible business practices was the "Mobile" 
track, which I sadly attended very little of.  The entertainment 
industry as a whole seems to be regarding mobile phones with a sort of 
apprehensive fascination.  They know there's something to be done 
there, but they don't know what it is because nobody's really done it 
yet.  I imagine that when someone does something innovative and cool 
with cell phone gaming, the publishers will all heave a collective sigh 
of relief, and promptly produce ten bland recreations of the same thing 
with different graphics.

The hardware manufacturers, though, are quite serious.  Nokia's N-Gage 
appears to have hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and the next 
generation of phones are getting even better than that.

As was to be expected, there was quite a bit of unemployment.  It was 
depressing to see so many people with signs taped to their 
laptops/shirts/faces that said things like "I AM A PROGRAMMER LOOKING 
FOR WORK PLEASE TALK TO ME".

However, I did encounter a surprising amount of idealism there.  It was 
really good to see that a lot of the people in the industry care about 
what they're doing, they know they have amazingly cool jobs, and they 
are still trying to have entertain people and have fun doing it.  
Unfortunately, none of the idealistic people have money right now.

Our (me and Sean Riley) "Python in the Gaming Industry" roundtable was 
relatively well-attended and I think we did a good job with it.  It was 
difficult to encourage discussion, though, because most of the people 
there were either only considering python or just starting out using 
it.  Furthermore, the few people who had actually used Python had very 
few complaints.  The most realistic one I heard was "python is hard to 
fit onto a PS2".

The highlight of the conference for me was meeting with Ragnar, who was 
the guy I nominally replaced on the UO2 project.  He attended my 
roundtable, and had a lot of useful things to say.  (Probably the most 
useful things said by somebody I didn't already know).  What made this 
the high point of the conference was that I demoed a bit of the work 
we've done in TR so far and he seemed to think it was pretty 
interesting.  Considering that this guy worked on UO and EQ, I was 
almost surprised that he would think my work was worthwhile :)

I also spent quite a bit of time with Jason Asbahr and John Cooney.  I 
also met up with two new folks through them who were quite interested 
in the whole open-source-game-infrastructure thing, and got to spend 
one crazy night trying to install a Debian system for usage in an 
arcade.  I literally worked until I fell over.

After GDC, for reasons that remain unclear to me, I flew to Boston, 
where I spent quite a bit of time with cyli before heading down to 
PyCon in Washington DC.

PyCon was the BEST CONFERENCE EVER.  I talked to so many people I don't 
even remember half of them.  If you tried to talk to me at PyCon, and I 
didn't have time, I'm sorry.  This did assuage my fears about not being 
able to find clients.  It's pretty obvious that a lot of people know 
about Twisted, and a lot of people are interested in what we're doing 
with it.  Ironically this means I will be spending a lot less time on 
looking for consulting work: I can work on divmod full-time without 
worrying about moving on to the next project or having a back-up plan, 
because I know there will be some people (even, perhaps, the federal 
government - I'm glad this took place in DC) interested in picking up 
some Twisted talent should the need arise.

So, a few things of note: not much coding happened, because having the 
sprint before the conference did not allow us much time to plan 
features we wanted to get implemented, and people were arriving by ones 
and twos during the whole thing.

Twisted also had its first serious legal issue.  Zoteca got a 
cease-and-desist letter from the band "Twisted Sister" while he was 
there, because of the unfortunately named Twisted package which I 
cannot name for legal reasons, but which will probably be called 
"twisted.sibling" in the future.  I'll be putting up a page for those 
of you with lots of google-juice to link to so that future web searches 
for Twisted Sister will turn up some mention of this legal notice.

The presentations at PyCon were excellent (they're now available in 
Twisted CVS as doc/historic -- slides for the "New Reality" and 
"Deferred Execution" talks are pending), and the whole Twisted team 
deserves kudos for putting together what amounted to an entire track.  
In particular, I think that Allen and Travis's talks went over well 
(for the less Twisted savvy, those were the New Reality and Twisted Web 
talks - text-game and web servers).  I was surprised to see so much 
interest in Twisted Web, but apparently an easy-to-configure but still 
"fast enough" webserver is a sore spot for existing technology.  I'm 
glad, since I think Twisted Web is really great and it's a pity that 
people keep re-implementing the same crap toy webserver over and over 
in lots of different python projects :).  I even got to talk to a few 
of the Webware folks about potentially using Twisted's server 
infrastructure, which would be great for both projects.

However, what was really awesome about it was getting the whole group 
together in a physical space and just talking about stuff.  We didn't 
get as much implementation done as I had hoped, but too many useful 
things came out of this conference for me to even summarize here.  I am 
convinced much more than ever (as well as empowered more than ever) to 
turn Twisted Matrix Labs into a real thing so that the Twisted team can 
get together in physical space and produce the kinds of amazing stuff 
that the 10x productivity increase associated with that implies.

Speaking of kudos, Gus also showed up with DDR pads and we plugged her 
playstation into the conference center's absurdly expensive audiovisual 
hardware, with help from the staff there.  It was a blast; pretty much 
the whole Twisted team got to dance a bit, including myself.  Looking 
at photos of myself, I definitely look less goofy than I used to when 
playing this game.  Ying decided not to dance there, but when we got 
back to Boston she immediately decided to get a PS2 and a DDR pad.  
They just arrived today and she has played 3 or 4 times already.

Now I'm going to try to meet up with a few friends in Boston before 
heading home (on April 10), and then stay in austin for AT LEAST a 
month before attempting to travel around the country again.  Hopefully 
one or more of the Twisted developers will be spending some time in 
Austin soon, so I will have someone to pair program with.

This seems like an unreasonably short summary of the last month, but I 
still have to finish tweaking my USENIX paper and get back to 
programming, so I will post those photos later!
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