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Developer evangelist Christian Heilmann was captured in Paris late last year, humoring a post-prandial crowd of European web developers and sharing the wisdom of web standards, as well as a humorous bit on how (and when) to make the international sign for "bullsh*t." He also discusses the benefits of web standards and the value of taking the long view, for increasing the resilience, flexibility, and maintainability of web projects.

You can watch the video, thanks to the generous permission of the Paris Web 2007 conference organizers.

Or take a quick trip through Chris's presentation, thanks to SlideShare.net:

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Keep an eye out for Yahoos in San Diego this week -- at the O'Reilly ETech 2008 conference (March 3-6) and the adjacent Graphing Social Patterns West:The Business and Technology of Social Networking Platforms (March 3-4).

On Monday at 1:15pm, Ian Kennedy will introduce Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog API: A Social Network Lookup Service in San Diego Ballroom B. At 1:30pm, he'll join panelists from Google, FriendFeed, Six Apart, and mSpoke, to discuss Social Networks and the Need for Feeds.

Meantime, over at ETech, food-hacker and engineer Marc Powell will present a tutorial called Kitchen Hack Lab in Marina Ballroom E at 1:30pm.

On Tuesday at 11:50am, in Marina Ballroom D, Elizabeth Churchill, from Yahoo! Research, will give a talk titled Users, Socializers, and Producers: How Internet Technologies are Changing Our View of Ourselves.

Stay tuned for later in the week; we've got something mythic in the works.

The Yahoo! Developer Network is sponsoring both these events. You'll know us by our mugs at the GSP Monday morning coffee break, at ETech we'll be at Booth #9. Stop by and say hello if you're in town, otherwise, check in at the Yahoo! Developer Network theater for ongoing video highlights, interviews, and coverage from GSP and ETech.

Yahoo! Developer Network Mixer photo by Jeff Kubina (2006).

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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

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MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy talked to Memcached developers who gathered last week to collaborate on code at an all-night hackfest. Memcached is "a general-purpose distributed memory caching system...distributed under a permissive free software licence."

Here's what we saw. From Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale:

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This Thursday evening we're hosting an all-night hackathon for memcached developers at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale campus. You can come and code all night long (that's what makes it a hackathon), or stop by in the evening to meet developers from the community and developers at Yahoo! who use memcached on sites like MyBlogLog to improve speed and scalability.

We're hoping to ship some new features and release the binary protocol. We'll be hacking from 8:00 PM Thursday till 7:00 AM Friday morning. Food and drink will be served.

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system that lets you store information of any type across multiple servers (clusters). It improves performance by letting you cache specific, frequently used information directly in memory. Instead of constantly reading from your database, the data you need is more readily accessible. The memcached layer sits in the middle between the front-end of your site and the database servers.

Memcached was developed by Danga Interactive for Live Journal, but is now widely used. It's available via a permissive free software license.

You can find more detailed info about this event on Upcoming (let us know if you're planning to come so we can order plenty of food). There's also a wiki, and even a listing on Facebook. Hope to see you there.

Photo from kentbrew.

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