ryan kennedy’s blog

My speaking duties for my current job have been limited to the Sunnyvale and London Yahoo! Open Hack Days. Now I’ve been invited to speak at Adobe MAX in Chicago on October 1st and 2nd. This is pretty huge, I’ve never presented at a big conference like this before. I’m equal parts terrified and excited, so it should be a lot of fun.

I’ll be presenting Air Mail, a desktop mail application written using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) and Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth). I wasn’t alone in writing Air Mail, Dav Glass was my co-conspirator. We wrote it over the course of 24 hours (although each of us only coded for about 12 hours each) during one of our internal hack days at Yahoo!. The photo at the right (courtesy of fellow Yahoo! Jeremy Johnstone) was taken during hack day in the tent where Dav and I presented Air Mail. Dav, unfortunately, won’t make it to MAX with me. That’s too bad because Dav has all of the YUI bits covered (since he works on YUI as his day job), so he’s really the best man to talk about the YUI bits of Air Mail.

The talk will be a bit of a case study on how we built Air Mail. I don’t have slides worked out just yet, but I’ve been thinking in my head about the things that would be good to go over. In particular:

• Getting BBAuth working in Adobe AIR. It’s not impossible, but it wasn’t easy, either.
• YUI and Adobe AIR. Most stuff works, but not everything. I’ll have to get more specific details from Dav.
• Problems with Adobe AIR. While AIR is a nice platform to build on, it does have some rather annoying problems. Some of them you can’t avoid as an application developer.

I’m sure more will come to mind as I start on the slides (probably this weekend). If you have suggestions, I’m all ears.

We’re planning on getting Air Mail put up where people can install and play with it. Additionally, I’m working this week to get permission to distribute the source code so people can crack it open and hack on it. Unfortunately, since we did this on Yahoo! time during hack day, Air Mail technically belongs to Yahoo!. As it turns out, it’s harder than you’d think getting the stars to align so you can turn your hack day creation loose.

If you’re going to be at MAX, my talk is scheduled for 2-3pm on Monday (10/1). In addition, we’ve been scheduled to hang out at AIR Park from 10-1pm and 4-7pm on Monday (10/1), 4-7pm on Tuesday (10/2) and 10-1pm on Wednesday (10/3). If you can’t make either of my talks, swing by AIR Park and I can give you the improv version.

Update: Turns out I’ll only be doing the one speaking session after all (Monday from 2-3pm). I’ve changed the post accordingly.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 8:49 am and is filed under Development, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.