The Conference At The End of the Universe: ADHOC 2005

It's getting to be that time of year again, when select Mac developers worldwide get an itch to spend 72 sleep-deprived hours in an otherwise unremarkable hotel in Dearborn, Michigan.

ADHOC 2005 is on.

ADHOC (Advanced Developers Hands On Conference, formally known as MacHack) soldiers into its twentieth anniversary this year, making the conference a pillar in the tumultuous computer industry. While ADHOC is well-established, don't confuse it with being staid. Every year the conference reinvents itself, playing off the energy released by the mesh of experienced attendees and the excitement of the first-timers. Every year also has a theme -- this year's is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After the Intel-based Macintosh announcement, "Don't Panic!" feels like an appropriate catch-phrase.

A "Big Tent" Party

You don't have to be a master developer to come to ADHOC. Indeed, ADHOC has notable attendees who aren't developers at all -- including Adam Engst, Scott Knaster and Andy Ihnatko (who hosts the Showcase this year). The keynote speakers tend to run half coder, half noncoder (this year's ADHOC speakers are FreeBSD co-founder/Darwin-manager Jordan Hubbard and sci-fi writer/Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow), so it's a great time even if you can't spell malloc().

If you've been following the conference and are blessed with an attention span longer than an elevator ride, Jordan's story may have rung a bell. Jordan was scheduled to speak at last year's conference, but instead took a detour to the hospital. Everything worked out: Jordan's revving to go for this year, and the capable and funny Steve Hayman stepped into Jordan's shoes.

Steve is a great speaker, and I talked him into showing off his "Mail Enhancer" for the audience. You know how iPhoto has its "Enhance" button, which takes an existing photo and "makes it better"? Steve wrote a version for Mail.app, using AppleScript. Upon execution, his script would magically make your email "better". That is, it would walk every word in your outgoing message, replacing it with a look-up from an online thesaurus. Brilliant. Better yet, you could run it multiple times in a row for "more better" output. It was disturbing to witness the original content methodically diverge from all semblance of sanity, so quickly.

David Pogue, who to my knowledge is the only New York Times columnist to have his own icon collection, kicked off the first keynote last year. True to form, he came armed with a piano, offering geek-flavored mash-ups. "Don't Cry for Me, Cupertino" and the inspired "Hello Voicemail, My Old Friend" were in the bunch. Initially he attempted to stump the audience with Mac OS X technical trivia from his own book, but at the end he was writing down notes for the next edition of his Missing Manual.

Which brings up one unique trait of ADHOC: it tends to have more than one keynote. Initially that may appear to violate the 'key' part of the 'keynote' definition, but it really doesn't. Since ADHOC is such a geeky conference, it can afford dual, asymmetrical keys. Deciding which speaker is the private key and which is the public key is left as an exercise for the reader.

There's a number of other unique traits. The conference runs continuously from Wednesday night into Sunday morning. The keynotes start at midnight, kicking off with late night pizza parties. The conference ends with a movie and a ice cream social, where the audience takes delight in ripping apart the flick we all just shared. Caffeinated beverages flow as freely as link spam on a unprotected Moveable Type installations. Then there's the famous hack Showcase, where programmer machismo rules and actually useful software is shouted down.

Show off at the Showcase

The Showcase is all about flaunting your cleverness and showing off your mastery of the system. Previous winning entries include "Apple Turnover", which rotated the screen image in realtime; "Unstoppable Progress" which uncapped the end of the progress bar, "filling" the window with aquatic fluid; and "FireStarter", which allowed taking control of another Mac's display just by plugging in your Mac via FireWire.

Beyond the "fire, water, turn", countless other clever hacks have been demoed onstage with varying levels of success and authenticity. It's cool if your hack blows up, so long as it's an entertaining explosion. And yes, you can submit hacks that are nothing but smoke and mirrors. But watch out, this audience can see through most tricks (in fact, this audience wrote most of the tricks), so if you're going that route be prepared to talk fast and leave a good demo flashbang onstage so you can beat a hasty retreat.

The best part of ADHOC is the people. ADHOC attracts folks who are passionate about their work. The sessions aren't given by someone being told to give a session. Instead, they're given by folks so excited about the topic, they just have to share. And because ADHOC is a smaller conference (less than one-tenth the size of WWDC), you have a chance to go deep, one-on-one, with domain experts. High-bandwidth face-time with enthusiastic, technical, industry leaders. Yum.

ADHOC is highly complementary to Apple's own WWDC. At WWDC, Apple turns the information fire hose on the audience. By the time ADHOC rolls in, you've had a chance to soak it up, test the new goodies and listen to what your fellow developers in the trenches have discovered. It helps to separate the truly significant from the merely hyped, and point out little-known facets that aren't getting enough attention. Michigan lays far outside Californian RDF.

The Toughest Conference You'll Ever Love

In summary, ADHOC is the most fun conference I attend. Each year I come away physically exhausted yet intellectually buzzed. My mind races and swirls with new energies and ideas based on the conversations I've had and the software I've seen. I wouldn't miss it. See you there.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005
03:25 PM