Track of the Week: Up All Night by Alex Clare
This week's track is Up All Night by Alex Clare, off of The Lateness of the Hour. Alex Clare's Too Close is the music behind all those very hip Bing commercials and been on the rock stations recently, so it was to find that song that I brought The Lateness of the Hour. Musically all over the place, it's a strange mix of dubstep and rock (dubrock anyone? or perhaps rockstep?) all the while being very dance-y. The real unifying force in the album is his voice, sometimes quite raw, sometimes super processed. Some songs lean heavily in the rock genre, such as the pick for this week. I choose it since it's so different than the one that gets radio play.
Track of the Week: Come Back Down by Greg Laswell
This week's track is Come Back Down by Greg Laswell. Until last week I'd heard nothing of Laswell and this song randomly came showed up when shuffling around a couple of music blogs. Apparently he's a relatively prolific singer/songwriter but this song is less "folk-y" and much more pop-rock. Sara Bareilles adds in a very dark verse against a pulsing guitar-drum-and-piano line and it totally works. It's a beautiful song and the lyrics also feel out of place ("you gotta take it on your own from here / it's getting pathetic and i'm almost done / here") with how upbeat the song sounds -- and again, it totally works.
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.
Track of the Week: Pretender by Miike Snow
This week's track is Pretender by Miike Snow, off of Happy to You. This is Miike Snow's sophomore album, after his self-titled eponymous debut. If you like the original album for it's fun, keyboard laced dance pop, you'll love the new album. It's in the same vein with a fresh take on the Snow sound. There are a handful of great tracks on the album but I love Pretender's horn and piano line that gives it a pumping/pulsing pop sound.
Thoughts on India Software Developer Conference
I landed in Bangalore at about 130am this morning, and later in the morning I presented Sencha Designer 2 at the India Software Developer Conference in Bangalore. Hosted by the magazine Silicon India, it's the 5th or 6th time they've had this conference and the attendance at the show was over 600 people. It's a weekend show so I was pretty surprised by the attendance. Comically while I was presenting, my laptop once fell off the podium in a huge thud and the lapel mic cut out on me a handful of times.
I attended the "Development" track, and from my vantage, the event was mostly focused around more enterprise software development, with a lot of speakers talking about Java and about cloud solutions. While a lot of the stuff around Java EE and that sort of stuff was largely lost on me, there were a few interesting sessions on the cloud side. I'd never seen much about Windows Azure and one of the sessions was an Azure 101. Looks like it has some very cool features that are very different than AWS or GAE. If I had an app to deploy, it would be interesting to check out. There was one feature it had which was a "migrate SQL" tool to migrate your installed Microsoft on-prem SQL Server instance to the cloud. I can't imagine how hard that feature would be to build. Very impressive.
I'm in Bangalore until tomorrow evening, then off the Pune for a few days then back to San Francisco by mid-week.
Track of the Week: Dance Or Die by Janelle Moane
This week's track is Dance Or Die by Janelle Moane off of The ArchAndroid. I can't get enough of this nu-funk sound (like Feb 20th's TOTW), and Janelle Moane's album is chock full of that fun, upbeat, and horn+synth heavy texture. I'd originally been turned on to Moane with her song Tightrope (thanks C for the tip), a collaboration with Big Boi. It's probably the most friendly / fun song on the album, but I liked this song as it's a little more laid back and showcases Moane's lyrical delivery and is just more funky. It's mixed to run right in to the following track, Faster, which takes the melody from Dance or Die, and pumps it up to a full on dance song, four on the floor with a solid hook. The album as a whole is worth a stream/download.
Thoughts from QCon London 2012
I'm sitting at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center at QCon London 2012. I just finished presenting "Building HTML5 Apps in Days, Not Weeks", which was an overview of how to build apps using Sencha Designer 2 Beta, and also how to leverage HTML5 to build cross platform apps. Room was fully seated and people had a lot of questions -- so, good signs all around.
Thus far it's been a great two days here at the event. From what I understand it's twice as busy as it was last year, and has sold out with over 1000 registered attendees. The attendees seem to be from a lot of smaller dev agencies across Europe which is great since they're often looking for solutions for projects they're working on. Tonight, I'll also be speaking at the .NET User Group meeting, talking about HTML5 and Sencha, then tomorrow afternoon I'm participating in a roundtable discussion on outsourcing (nothing to do with HTML5 or the web -- just a general product development conversation). I'm looking forward to the next day and a half here in London.
I'm in Europe until mid-next week, sticking around through the weekend to do some customer meetings next week in Paris. I did manage to sneak out of the event for a few hours to see the Churchill War Cabinet rooms (very cool) and do a little shopping on Jermyn Street. Looking forward to spending the weekend in London and Paris and meeting up with friends.