First of traditional Yakut meetings was yesterday. We got together at Identra HQ.
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| Heated discussions taking place |
Basically we get know each other a little bit in this first meeting. We discussed about Ruby and Rails as well. Hopefully we will have deeper discussions at each meeting from now on.
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| Erek Göktürk |
Erek is organizing and at present hosting this event. If you are interested in Rails and Ruby, go ahead and join Yakut.
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| Left to right: Özgün, Volkan and Arda |
I met the founders of kariyerGENÇ last week. It is job search service for new graduates. During our conversation Sinan asked told me I should sign up too. I must say I’ve found it flattering that he considered me young. So I signed up. The service is built around the main value of building your CV online easily. OK, let’s build a CV. Aren’t CV’s fun.
I have edited and edited and edited… Finally, last section; proficiencies. Huh, which proficiencies could a new graduate possibly have? Let’s make it the last part.1 I scrolled through the dropdown of options to find Python and Django. No Python! Unsurprisingly no Django. But wait, the list doesn’t have Ruby, RoR, LISP either. But they included some programming languages I have never heard of; like HTML. What is this HTML programming language?
Basically I was left with the choices of Java and C. I couldn’t select them because neither is my main programming language. I can only select them after I select Python. So I left that section blank and sent them a contact form thing. It’s not cool not having an e-mail in your contact us section guys. If you are concerned about SPAM there are ways to evade e-mail harvesting bots. Please don’t be afraid of people who prefer using e-mail. I got a timely reply. From a nobody. Again, not cool. I am person and I’d like to communicate with another person. It’s OK to publish a generic e-mail on the site. But the reply should come from a employee e-mail and contain the employees name. I give you my name and e-mail when I contact you, right? You should have the decency to do the same when you reply.
Anyway, the reply I got was brief. In short it said “OK, we’ll do it.” Nice. Except they didn’t. I checked yesterday and they still had HTML programming language and not Python. Oh, well. So much for the orange ties. I deleted my account for the reason of being totally useless. It could be useful feedback if you asked why, when your users delete their accounts, you know?
In fact kariyerGENÇ is not doing it wrong. They’re just taking a picture of The Industry. The picture is correct, The Industry is doing it wrong. But that’s another topic for discussion2. What was disappointing for me was the lack of agile in kariyerGENÇ. I don’t mean agile methodology here, I mean agile technology. Technology and infrastructure that changes and adopts fast. For instance; how long would it take to make the change in a Django project? Yes, Django. The framework most people ignore or haven’t even heard of. You would just log-in the admin, add a new proficiency, save, optionally run a custom management command. 10 minutes at most.
It doesn’t matter much even if they add new proficiencies now. First of all a fixed list of options doesn’t work well where there are virtually unlimited possibilities. Second of all that dropdown is hideous, and increasing the number of options will only make it worse. Instead they should just let people tag themselves, WordPress style. Django-tagging does that automagically. You know, Django, the framework you don’t list in your proficiencies.
The language for web development in Türkiye is PHP. Java is on the rise, in a couple of years it will be as popular as PHP. I am not kidding myself; these two and that horrible propriety thing that I don’t even want to name are industry standart in the world. But they also use other technologies. At least they experiment. At least they know that other alternatives exist. Here those minorities doesn’t even exist.
I frequently hear people saying “Python is a toy language“. Because for them there are serious, proper programming languages for grown-ups and serious, proper frameworks for grown-ups as Cal Henderson said …and everything else is a toy. You can’t use Python/Django for anything professional. Well, Markafoni did, with much success.
Think about it for a second; if what the majority have generally chosen the best, wouldn’t we live in a better society & environment than this? Just think about it.
Meanwhile I’ll be playing with my toys. 
1: Actually kariyerGENÇ got it right here; in reality most of the new graduates have no proficiency. So, they’ll pick I know Word and Excel here even though they aren’t really proficient.
2: …and flame wars.
Freedays was great as usual. Seminars and workshops were interesting and informative. In my opinion organization was flawless as well. I think this is a result of LKD and Bilgi University teams’ coordinating together1.
Nice presentation by Enver Altın. Short slides2, confident, humorous and to-the-point style. Careful preparation is usually evident in good presentations. Overall I liked it very much. What he says basically is:
Some LKD people tried to undermine the seminar becase it contained criticism of LKD. I don’t know what were they actualy trying to accomplish, but they didn’t distrupt the event for long enough. All they accomplished is to show what kind of people you’ll be dealing with if you join LKD. Well done!
Is open source way of development efficient3? I don’t know. This very interesting seminar topic, and appereantly very interesting research, was murdered with lots and lots of details on research methodology and details on the particular data sample used. If more time was spent on the findings and observations, this talk could be much more interesting and informative for the audience. I think the conclusion was that the OSS way is more efficient.. no, no, it wasn’t.. or was it?
Can Burak Çilingir gave a nice workshop on Django. He first explained all the key concepts and then we did some coding. Even though we couldn’t create a working app, It was gentle introduction to Django. There certainly is a need for more Django developers.
I have been wanting to learn RoR for a long time. But I just wasn’t able to wrap my head around Ruby. After Erek Göktürk’s presentation I now, at least, have a rough understanding. Special thanks for his patience with my repetitive questions about blocks. I should learn Rails, and Ruby, better. I believe there are lessons to learn from Rails.
This seminar was the only one emphasizing hacker culture over software freedom. Jonathan Conradt of Google Chrome talked about the history of hackers and then the history of Google, Chrome’s implementation and vision and a little bit about Google’s vision. How “silly fast” Chrome is and will be.
The questions phase was a disaster though. Almost all the questions were aimed at Google’s don’t be evil motto, in the form of “you say you are not evil, but you do x and you do y“. One question was “why did Google buy a fighter airplane?“. Another one was “isn’t that creating a monopoly to require a Google ID for Android phones?“. Yeah, to get a Google ID you need to sign with your blood. But the dumbest question was “so you are collecting all these personal information. Do you share them with NSA?“. Do you guys really think all that SPAM you are getting is the result of harvesing e-mails from public websites? Wisen up a little bit please.
I wouldn’t be surprised, with this kind of treatment, if Google never ever EVER sends a representative again. Should we have kissed Google’s ass. No, that’s equally low. But trying to play I’m going to take you down with my questions is at the very least hostile. I have even heard one guy saying “oh, he didn’t take my question because he must have sensed that I’ll ask a difficult one“. We all witnessed someone else complaining the government to a representative of a foreign company for developing IE only websites.
This one, by Koray Löker, was by far the best seminar for me. The name of the presentation is actually something like; An Elegant Pass from Free Software to Culture Industry: Copyleft. He was well prepared, the topic was interesing and the rhythm of the presentation was almost perfect. If I was able to pick one session to recommend, this would be it.
Sometimes you need to step away, and even step out of your problem to gain a better understanding of it. Investigating open source movies4 may give us insights about sharing, freedom and, most importantly, originality aspects of open source software. Brilliant idea.
Freedays is the only major event for free software community in Türkiye. I would like to thank everybody for their selfless efforts and the sponsors for making it possible.
Hope to see you there next year.
1: This year two events, Freedays of Bilgi University and Linux and Free Softare Festival of LDK, are merged.
2: Few in number, short in content. Mostly a few words per slide. I hate presentations with 1000 slides and 100 words per slide.
3: Compared to conventional development methods used for propriety software.
4: Such as Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny.
