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On Monday, we went to Adobe Engage at the Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco. Billed as “Adobe's annual conversation on the future of applications and the web” – this gathering of “key thought leaders and influencers” was also a coming out party for Adobe AIR, which officially launched on the same day.

AIR allows web developers to package up existing web apps or Flash movies as full fledged desktop applications. The AIR runtime must be installed on a user's machine, but once in place – the same AIR app will run on Windows or a Mac, and a Linux implementation is due out soon.

Robert Scoble was at the front, live streaming the event from his cellphone via qik.com and his archived content provides an interesting bird's-eye view of the event. After introductory messages from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch, Adobe handed things off and let several different companies share the work they’ve been doing with AIR over the past year.

We saw a variety of cool apps, but perhaps more interesting were the types of teams that have been building them. Most of the AIR apps presented at Engage came from very small teams - internal propellerheads given the freedom to experiment and play in a very small corner of their organizations, all of whom have been attracted to using Flex and AIR. Even the names of these teams were telling: Yahoo's Media Innovation and Advanced Products groups met up with participants from the “Disruptive Innovation Group” at EBay, the Research Development team at the New York Times, and the NASDAQ Research group, to name some of the teams.

Yahoo! presented 3 apps. The first was a News Minibar application which we originally developed in AS2, wrapped in AS3, and converted into an AIR application. It sits on your desktop and keeps you up to date with weather, stock prices, and newsfeeds of your choice. We also released an updated beta version of our Blog Remix app, which lets you remix different music blog posts together and export them via HTML to your blog.

Our Yahoo! Live demo included a personal shout to the audience at Engage from music artist Tilly Key via her Y! Live page. Things got interesting when people watching Tilly’s page realized they were able to enter live comments that would appear in real time in front of the audience at Engage, but by that time Live product manager Michael Quoc had moved on. He was showing some of the cool mashups that external developers have already built using the Y! Live APIs. During the Q&A session afterwards, someone commented that we had “guts to show something like this with wifi, and all the other craziness..."

In all, the Engage event provided an early peek at interesting new technology and applications in 2008. Apparently many people (and companies) seem to agree that for building innovative software, less is more. As a developer on a small team in a big company, it’s great to see platforms emerge that allow small teams to build great things, “upon the shoulders of giants.”

Adobe Engage 2008 about to begin photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

Popularity: 30% [?]

On Tuesday, the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) team celebrated their second anniversary of making life easier for front-end developers. The YUI is a set of JavaScript utilities and controls, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

There were not quite simultaneous parties in London--in a dark West End pub, and in Sunnyvale--at Yahoo's HQ. YUI has fostered a dedicated, generous community of developers helping each other out and contributing knowledge and code to the project. The Sunnyvale party celebrated some of the heroes of this far-flung community. You'll find ample coverage on the YUI blog (thanks Eric!) and more good stuff on the Y! Developer Network blog.

Christian Heilmann is a Yahoo technology evangelist based in the U.K -- Christian started warming up for the festivities a week earlier, with a talk he delivered at GeekUp Leeds, a grassroots gathering of web developers in the north west of England. Christian's presentation takes a head-on approach to YUI's terrible twos with a compelling answer to the question, "Why the YUI?" (or furthermore, "why any library"). Watch for yourself:

You can follow along with the presentation, Y the YUI? over at slideshare.net.

Big thanks to Dominic Hodgson, and the folks from NorthCast, who documented Christian's presentation at Geekup Leeds, at the Old Broadcasting House, and gave us permission to distribute their video by embedding it here.

If you just want to see some party photos of 60 or 70 happy developers drinking beers in London ("in a dark and dingy pub so the lighting is rather moody"), here's a set for you:
YUI Library and YPattern Library Turn 2!

Some stunning photos of happy developers, this time from Sunnyvale, thanks to Dustin Diaz, who has generously let us use some of them in the "Who We Are" slideshow above on the right rail:
YUI 2nd Birthday

Popularity: 25% [?]

Recently, we've been hosting the NASA CoLab Luna Philosophie talk series at Brickhouse in San Francisco. It's a public conversation between NASA thought leaders and top scientists and the community: "Anyone who is interested in an open, creative dialogue on human, space related topics is encouraged to attend!"

The second NASA CoLab@Brickhouse session took place earlier this month. Tom Cochrane of NASA Ames discussed his most recent project, Virtual Reality System Engineering Environments for the Space Program. He reflected on his lengthy career -- 25 years of using ever more powerful technology to engineer complex simulation models ranging from ground water movement to space flight.

Building on the tradition of SimCity and SimEarth, Tom and his team at NASA Ames have built SimStation, SpaceStation:SIM, and SimCEV. These are virtual environments for browsing and understanding real human space flight systems environments. The team is currently developing SimConstellation, a viewer that will support NASA's plans to return to the moon.

Unlike Sim games from Maxis, NASA simulations are mission critical: if the engineers get it wrong, the astronauts don’t come back. The simulations monitor oxygen levels, rocket fuel, and a range of other factors to accurately replicate what’s supposed to happen. You can drill into each phase of the mission and rotate the views to see exactly what’s going on inside the craft.

This degree of complexity is extraordinary. For instance, in order to land on a particular spot on the moon, the spacecraft has to orbit the moon in a particular orbit. To achieve that orbit, it must get onto a precise space trajectory out of earth’s atmosphere, and for that the craft must launch from a particular spot, at a particular speed. And that’s just for modeling orientation...

One memorable quote from Tom: “I remember being a brat on the Apollo program – they did all their documentation using typewriters and carbon paper.”

Decades later, Tom and his team have built an entire environment that generates simulations. An environment that's light-years beyond what you could visualize with a typewriter.

Thanks to Ricky Montalvo for his high-quality video of the talk. Watch it here:

Video by Ricky Montalvo, Yahoo! Developer Network, Total runtime 59min:33sec

download (m4v)

Popularity: 8% [?]

We’ve had some great speakers at Brickhouse and last week’s talk by Jeff Hammerbacher of Facebook, part of the 2008 HackHouse talk series, was no exception. Jeff is head of data and analytics at Facebook. He spoke about his role, what his team has accomplished, and some of the challenges they face.

It was standing room only, highly technical, and totally engaging. Jeff described what it’s like to manage unprecedented growth of highly sensitive user data in a challenging business environment ("we’re collecting tens of terabytes of data every day”). The team first tried a standard MySQL database, but quickly outgrew it, and had to devise unique ways of doing weblog analysis.

I was personally interested in how Facebook deals with constantly changing data elements – it’s very hard to track historical trends when the data is always changing. At Facebook, they’ve built custom analytics packages to handle this problem and intend to release some of it open-source. Go Jeff!

Special thanks to Nikhil Bobb, from the BravoNation team, for inviting Jeff to come in and present; and to Ricky Montalvo, from the Yahoo! Developer Network, for the video.

Total runtime: 1hr:11min
download (m4v)

Editor's note: Jeff Hammerbacher's presentation, The Facebook Data team: Infrastructure and insight is also available on Slideshare. Thanks Jeff!

Popularity: 11% [?]

After arriving at Yahoo! last year, I hoped to make myself at home by seeking out the "Women in Technology" group I assumed must exist at such a large company. Nothing turned up. Hmmm, maybe gender really is a non-issue here, I thought, being new to Silicon Valley. With so many geeks, there must be plenty of female geeks as well. After working for three years in compiler development, it was really refreshing to have a few women on my team, so I shrugged off my concern.

To get to know my new colleagues, I followed the weekly "Big Thinker" series featured on Yahoo!'s corporate intranet. For about eight weeks straight I read about guys (nominated by guys) who'd invented, championed, or delivered something awesome at work.Product meetings, tech talks, even the cafeteria definitely skewed male.Come on, I thought, there must be women 'big thinkers' doing awesome tech stuff around here too. How could I find them?

In Oct 2006, a few women scientists had just returned from the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference. Good timing. After an inspiring conference named for a pioneer programmer, I imagined they'd be primed for my idea – so I organized a meeting to start a women-in-tech initiative at Yahoo!. We met, launched a mailing list, and the community grew. That was just over a year ago.

Fast forward to the final weeks of 2007: Yahoo! Women in Tech is now 250 members strong and includes women from IT, web developers, software engineers, computer scientists, researchers, and tech recruiters. We've partnered with other organizations for women in tech, such as the Society of Women Engineers, FountainBlue, and Women 2.0. We've hosted events focusing on personal and professional development.

In 2007, we also reached out to more than 100 girls, to encourage them to enter science and engineering fields. My particular passion for K-12 outreach goes way back. It was sparked in grad school when I helped IBM run workshops for girls. I loved my work at IBM, but trying to impress kids by describing the thrill of compiler dev was a challenge.

At Yahoo!, we have the perfect environment to inspire the next generation of women to consider careers in computer science and engineering. Yahoo! is fun, colorful and, most important, it's highly visible to kids. After running our first Yahoo! Women in Tech outreach program for high school girls, I knew we were on to something. The reaction was huge: Many of the girls wanted to start work at Yahoo! immediately! Think of it as early-stage recruiting.

I want to send thanks to all the Women in Tech volunteers around the company (guys too!) who've contributed time and energy to forming a network, identifying great role models, and giving back to the community.

She's Geeky polaroids from Liz Henry. Used with permission.

Women in Tech banner photo by Karolina Buchner. Used with permission.

Popularity: 14% [?]