Seth Ladd's Blog

Aloha! Thanks to TechHui and University of Hawaii's Pacific New Media for producing the TechHui 2010 Conference and inviting me to join. I was lucky enough to talk about HTML5 and then join the Rich Internet Applications panel to represent HTML5. The Star Advertiser even wrote up a short blurb on my involvement : Google guru to gab Google is sending one of its newest developer advocates to Hawaii for tomorrow's annual TechHui conference, where he will preach the gospel of an open Web to the glitterati of Hawaii's geek, er, tech community. Seth Ladd lived in Hawaii for seven years, "the longest I've ever lived anywhere," but he moved away about three weeks ago to join Google. He was most recently director of software at Camber Corp., a defense contractor with offices here. "Google's really betting on an open Web, open technology and open standards" for Web development, he said. For the dedicated HTML5 talk, I used the Interactive HTM

Aloha, I'm at RailsConf 2010 this week, and really enjoying networking and learning from the Rails community. This community is very concerned with learning, improving, and writing clean code. Most Rails conferences, RailsConf and my own admittedly, are focused on server-side concerns (Model or Controller) to the detriment of front end engineering (View). This is neither bad nor good, but I would like to see more focus on the View. Consequently, it's difficult to get a good feeling of modern View engineering practices in the Rails community. Modern View engineering is, in my mind, adoption of the family of HTML5 features. HTML5 formalizes and standardizes on many of the rich user interface features that native clients and desktop applications have had for years. Web applications are now capable of providing very rich and immersive experiences. This should be extremely exciting for the Rails community! To help myself gain a real understanding of the Rails community

Aloha! The Ruby on Rails community will be converging in Baltimore between June 7 and 10 for RailsConf 2010. Google will be on hand to take in the great talks, speak about OAuth, OpenID and the Google Data APIs and Scaling Rails on App Engine with JRuby and Duby , and to collect the feedback and ideas from the Rails community. Google announced a lot of interesting services within the past year, many at Google I/O, that would appeal to Rails developers. For example, the Google Apps Marketplace allows you to integrate, and monetize, your application with customers' Google Apps domains. The new Google Storage Service , a cloud data storage service, was also just announced with features such as write-read consistency. We know developers want to start hacking with these technologies, so Google will be hosting a Hackfest and reception at RailsConf 2010 . There will also be food, drinks, and swag. If you register for the RailsConf Google Hackfest before June 8th you can req

If you are familiar with the iPhone or iPad, then you are most certainly familiar with one of its killer features: the App Store. The App Store provides a slick, and captive, distribution channel and monetization facility for developers. The App Store also offers an easily searchable, and easily purchasable, shopping experience for end users. Those are the Good Parts of the App Store. The App Store has its negative aspects as well. Applications written for the iPhone or iPad must be written in Objective C. This is not necessarily bad by itself, but it certainly limits your options and could prove to be a challenging learning curve. Also, the App Store has an ever evolving approval process. Applications can be rejected for numerous reasons, sometimes after they have been approved. This vague policy and sometimes seemingly random enforcement is a challenge for developers, and spell disaster if a money making application is suddenly pulled from the App Store. Those are some of

Aloha! It's day two of my new adventure as a Developer Advocate for Google. I have joined the Chrome Developer Relations team based in Mountain View, California, but more on that later. Day One was a full day of Orientation. We are affectionately called Nooglers, and Google did a good job of introducing us to the culture, business, food, forms, tips, and even safety and security. My Noogler class was not small, and they run this every week! It's clear they are growing fast and have this orientation process down pretty well. For those wondering, some of us were able to choose Windows laptops. Although, easily 75% or more of my Nooglers had a MacBook Pro on their desk. I heard from at least one PC user that they wanted to switch to Mac after seeing so many out there. We received breakfast and lunch. As you can imagine, food is no joke to Google. I believe I dreamt about food last night! Feeding the Googlers is serious business, and I look forward to trying all 19