Thoughts on Adobe Camp Brasil

I presented earlier today at Adobe Camp Brasil, in the city of Maceió in north-eastern Brasil. It’s a wonderful city, beach-side, with blue skies, low humidity and moderate high-80s weather. The conference has a definite Adobe-tint to it, but this year was replete with HTML5 activity with most of the sessions being about HTML5, and the Flash sessions about gaming.

My talk (slides) was about mobile HTML5, Sencha fundamentals, and Sencha Touch + Sencha Architect. It’s the first time I’ve ever presented through a simultaneous translator, where I spoke in English and the audience wore headsets. When they had a question, they’d ask in Portuguese, and I’d listen on a headset and speak back in English. It felt very UN-esque. It’s clear in this community people are looking for solutions to move on to web-standards based solutions, and Sencha and others have great offers to help. Also of note was while the conference was largely Brasilans, there was a sizable representation from places like Peru and Chile, which I think goes to show the enthusiam of the LATAM developer market.

Lastly, shout out to Demian Borba and his family. They’ve organized the event over the last few years. It’s my first time attending, but many of the Adobe folks I know here have been coming for a while and I think they’d all agree that it’s very well put together and I’m looking forward to hopefully participating again next year.

Track of the Week: Wolves at the Door by David Bazan

This week’s track is Wolves at the Door by David Bazan off of Strange Negotiations. I had asked a friend (thanks Dan P) for some recommendations for music that was rock-y, like Crosses was a few weeks back but new and fresh and this came back as his recommendation. Great album and the first few tracks on the album are really solid rock arrangements. There are a few songs in there that are more power-ballad-esque, which I don’t think work with Bazan’s delivery, but the drums, electric guitar, lead singer, jam songs are great. Now, this song, I’ve read the lyrics a few times and I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s about, but I love the hook: “Cuz you’re a goddamn fool / and I love you / yeah I love you”. It’s either about actual wolves eating the protagonist’s family (unlikely as that is) or some very anti-government death-to-taxes story. Whatever it is, it makes for catch rocky music.

Sencha Architect 2

The very first thing my boss at Sencha asked me to work on when I joined was: “figure out what we’re doing with Designer”. Having known nothing then and only a skeleton team we started to sketch out what would become Sencha Architect 2. That was a year ago, and thankfully we’ve been lucky enough to be joined at Sencha by a great team from engineering, to product management, to UX that made Sencha Architect 2 happen. It’s crazy to look back to see in the last year all the amazing products we’ve released, such as Sencha Touch 2, the preview of Sencha.io, and now Architect 2. It’s such a huge step forward for us and for the web. I’ve been on the road demoing it at conferences and people go crazy when you see how easy it is to build an HTML5 app, which is a testament the work the team has put in to make the product easy and productive to use.

Track of the Week: It’s Alive by Chill Bump

This week’s track is It’s Alive by Chill Bump off of Back To The Grain. I’ve been jonesing for some classic raps over beats for a while and this track by Chill Bump showed up, burning up the Hype Machine charts a few weeks back. The hook “hip hop is not dead” sums up the sentiment of the EP: real hip hop still exists. It apparently doesn’t have a Wikipedia page anymore, but is available with suggested payments on Bandcamp.