Nice Weekend in Mountains
Friday Jun 30, 2006
Well, technically this is my first post, but I decided to make it just a little bit more than just a simple "Hello, World!" post and tell you about one little trip to Krkonose mountains we did last weekend with my colleague from "Install team" William Schumann.
As you might already know from Roumen's post, there was Czech Republic Championship in Programming for Young People, finals actually, so it was just the brightest young programmers from all over Czech Republic (or at least the ones who dare to compete) and we were invited to come and talk about whatever we thought would be interesting, cool and have some educational value for our young programmers and possibly (in many cases hopefully) our future colleagues.
One interesting thing about the event was, that it looks like when Microsoft (they have been co-sponsoring this competition) found out that we'll be presenting there, they decided to "send" someone in as well even though they originally didn't plan to! Hmm, so they care about our young apprentices and their education as well! 
So, there were these two nice (they really were) guys from that company, talking waaay too long, showing their latest greatest most colorful eye-candy translucent windowing "foo" and when they were done with all that, it turned out they'll leave there the gaming console they brought with them with bunch of games, so the kids can have some fun after all the hard work they did that day - and believe me, those kids really did very hard job solving though programming problems and really needed some well deserved time off.
OK, I thought, now we're done, because everybody is just too tired, they've been shown how to create cool applications (with or without windows) easily and they have this new toy to play with, so there's no chance they'll be willing to listen to "boring" talk about Solaris and OpenSolaris, about its installation and about the development, source management, tracing and debugging tools, about way how to participate in the OpenSolaris communities, how to submit their own patches etc. etc. etc.
"Calm down everybody, installing OpenSolaris is easy
"How wrong I was! The young people were just amazing listeners, they're were asking interesting and well thought out questions and they were reacting very openly whenever they thought they just needed to shout. There was one interesting comment during my demo of vim, cscope and OpenGrok and how to use these tools to help you during development of very big projects such as OpenSolaris - the guy said something like: "... but all this is already in tool ABC on platform XYZ , so what's all this fuss about?" Well, all I was trying to show them was that there are user-friendly and very advanced development and source "browsing" tools available on OpenSolaris (of course not limited to it), so they have all the comfort if they decide to get their hands "dirty" with operating system development.
Then I pulled out the heavy weaponry - DTrace. Even though the demo was fairly simple, it was pretty obvious, that the people immediately saw the benefits of it. During the break I was told by one guy that "that debugging stuff" was just the most interesting part of the whole weekend. Of course it was! I only wish I was more proficient with it and could have shown you guys more advanced "tricks" with it - definitely a TODO for next time 
Then I just had to send them (and myself of course) out to get some fresh air (we were in mountains after all and the weather was just lovely) and promised, that we can continue after dinner if they were interested or that they can just come and talk to us directly. Well, another surprise came ... not too long after dinner (10 or 15 minutes max.) the presentation room was full again and we went on discussing just about everything directly or indirectly related to OpenSolaris till late in the evening
I'd like to thank all the people who made this possible - among others this was our colleague Zdenek Kotala, who's been member of jury for years now and gave me and William the opportunity to pariticipate, to the guys from the other company to help me realize, that there are still real programmers interested in real things (I mean the kids now, of course ) and to all the smart and hard working members of OpenSolaris (and open source) community who make the OS and the tools better every day (and giving me topics to talk about )
... and of course big big thank-you goes to the kids (young gentlemen actually) who I had the privilege to talk to and to discuss things with - you were great and I hope you'll try out the software Sun has to offer to you, I hope to see your posts on OpenSolaris.Org forums and I hope to see your code (bugfixes etc.) being "put back" (included or commited) into OpenSolaris. Come join us - it'll be fun, I promise!
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