So, the past few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind, which is why I am finishing this post two weeks after being in Los Angeles for the DevArt meet in Echo Park.

Part I: Traversing The State Easy, Traversing LA Slightly more Convoluted but sort of Funny

The drive down was uneventful, as was checking into our hotel.  The cab ride to the meet was a little more colorful.  I had one called up to the front of the Le Parc, driven by a very pleasant, heavily accented Armenian gentleman.

You may be wondering how I picked him out as Armenian; well, he had, embedded into the ceiling of the cab near the rear view mirror, a rather large (~ 7″) crucifix with what I guessed was either Armenian script (I actually have a hard time telling the difference at a certain distance, but this was somewhat obvious), denoting he was an adherent of the Armenian Orthodox rite.

I have found that being culturally aware has its advantages with many people in many situations, not the least of which being taxi drivers; they seem to get you there faster when they are aware that you know their cultural identity exists.  This guy was no exception.  He asked me what I was,to which I replied “American”.  This caused the customary response of “yeah, but what are you?” at which point I admitted my family originates from Portugal.  I also noted that one of the most famous people in Portugal, was an Armenian oil baron who spent most of his later years in Lisbon and started a foundation named after him, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

This got him moving at a rapid clip (nearly escape velocity), and he said his credit card rig in the cab was on the fritz, didn’t mind taking me to the closest grocery in a questionable borough and waiting for me in the parking lot as I sought an ATM, where I gave him a ridiculously oversized tip and a thank you.

Part II: The actual DevMeet; Mostly Great People and A Few That Are Considerably less than Great.

As I arrived in Echo Park, the crowd had swelled to a three digit number of attendees, of all makes and descriptions.  Some were even socially tolerable.  I say this because in my years as an admin at DA, there were certain demographic slices on the site that would cause my misanthropy gland to swell to the size of  K2 quite rapidly.  One of those would be admin fanboys/girls.  People whose only interest in you was that you held some perceived mystical status, replete with near omniscient powers, inerrant thoughts,  and possibly the secret combination of  Kentucky Fried Chicken’s 11 herbs and spices.

The fixation moves into the bizarre when they ask you to do things like confer some fundamentally awe-inspiring benefaction upon them, like signing their cricket bat (which actually occurred) or acknowledging that they have been staring at you for the last three minutes without blinking, to the point that their corneas have dried up.  It’s quaint for a moment, but quickly can turn into really weird and almost creepy.

After the group photo -see if you can even spot me in this- we broke out into smaller groups based on mediums, and proceeded to do a kind of un-conference set of discussions.

The small group I joined was my former responsibility: the traditional galleries. We covered the new portfolio feature before dispersing (in general, I feel very positive about the portfolio feature, and see quite a lot of potential for it), with some of us going to DA CEO Angelo Sotira’s presentation on groups (which I did not even know about until I ran into Angelo and he told me about it).

It was in all of this that I met some new people, including Margot Dent who gets maximum coolness points for her “Same as it Ever Was” tattoo (Talking Heads fans of the world, unite). I also finally got to meet eStunt, whose real name I still do not know, but who made for good company, and I finally got some clarification about the ‘blue blob’.

The real cool part was hooking up with some of the ‘old guard’ from the IT and development groups: Sasha and Chris specifically. In the end I spent most of the afternoon and evening with them, talking about various fun and thrilling things like UTF-8 usage in MySQL tables, and the pros/cons of Trac vs. Redmine (I prefer the latter), and Lucene vs. Sphinx (I still have no preference).

Related to all this, I can understand the rationale Angelo has against using an open DA API akin to what Facebook and other social media websites use. Being able to control what gets put onto a DA page is important for economic and branding reasons (unlike the aggragating Social media sites, DA is not trying to be everything to everyone, it is trying to be very specific things to a particular community – large and varied as it is).

That being said, I still believe there is a benefit to an API for allowing users (subscribers) to export/pipe/control content to other places. In general, in terms of APIs, features and the like, I kind of rambled about the following:

• Have an API that makes one able to create a widget that automatically takes any new works I submit to create a status update to a microblog (i.e. Twitter, Identi.ca) or to automagically post to zeruch.net, or even to a Flickr account.
• To use something other than the rather clunky flash object to embed images elsewhere. That whole thing needs a re-write, or an alternative method closer to what Flickr does. Simple and elegant process, is simple and elegant.
• Opening some sales/geographic data to users in a way that allows people to see where sales of ones work is happening.  Being able to take frequency and location of transactions, and marry them to say Google Maps, might be a neat premium widget.
• Like Artician, develop ways to import content into DA in a simple way; in a similar way to what Artician has done, allow my Wordpress (or other blogging service) posts to be autoposted to my DA journal, or pull in my content from other popular sites.

By the time all this jabbering was done, we were all sitting at formica tables at Happy Tom’s, an eatery I can only describe as ‘kitschy’ in that way that is kitschy not because its trying to be.  Here, the bulk of the time was myself, Chris, Sasha and for some of the time, Angelo, looking at some new features in depth, and the Groups feature really has some legs on it.  Much more than I suspect the average user would think about at first pass.

This all gets to support my general assessment that DA has made some serious improvements in its infrastructure and in how its managing development and rollout.   While there is always room for improvement(s), the fact is that DA seems on a path that looks solid, and may lead to real game changing evolution if it keeps this going.

Part III: Escape From LA

I did not get to try the pool on the roof of my hotel, but room service was a good supplement to the flavored grease of Happy Tom’s (my guess is Tom is Happy because he has a decent cardiologist), and since we were too tired to go out on the town, the missus and I just ordered said room service, and watched Highlander on the TV.

Which reminds me: can someone please explain how Sean Connery, who is Scottish, has made a career out of playing any number of other nationalities with his Scottish accent, gets to be in a movie mostly filmed in Scotland, with a name like ‘Highlander’, and end s up playing a Spaniard born in Egypt? Or that the title role is played by a French-American with a Geneva accent? Who did casting for this damn film? I LOL with great fury.

Anyway, we left LA on Sunday and instead of taking I-5 opted for 101, which is a much more picturesque drive. I was quite happy to be off the road and back on my patio with a drink and a book.