The Joy of Flex

Last week the entire Buzzword team joined the rest of Adobe’s U.S. technical staff at an internal event in San Jose called Tech Summit 2008. Every couple of years Adobe gets this very large group of people together as a way of fostering teamwork, collaboration, technical growth, and general knowledge about what we’re all up to. Adobe has developers in quite a few locations just in the U.S., so as a way of getting to know other people at Adobe, it really has no equal.

In addition, when the Buzzword team joined Adobe, we actually became part of a fairly large distributed team of people working on hosted services: this includes the engineering teams working on BRIO and SHARE, and lots of others besides. This team has got people working in Newton, San Francisco, San Jose, and other locations, so we’re definitely challenged to figure out the best ways to work together over distances. Adobe owns and uses (and makes!) some of the best software and hardware collaboration tools in the business, but still, nothing beats face to face.

Fortunately, the hosted services team got a chance to spend the day together on Monday, we had a fair amount of hang-out-and-work-together-with-laptops time on Friday, and there were a bunch of social/dinner/pool-hall type events in the evenings. I feel like I have really connected with folks on those teams a lot better now, so that was a win for the team as a whole.

There were some great sessions at the Tech Summit. Some of them were very directly applicable to my day to day work, but for some reason the most interesting ones were less directly applicable and more thought-provoking. I’ll try and narrow it down to three.

The most jaw-dropping talk was called “How We Hear,” given by James A. Moorer in the Digital Video Engineering group. James Moorer is, among many other things, the composer of the THX sound, also known as “Deep Note.” The talk focused primarily on the physical mechanisms inside the ear and the interesting ramifications that these mechanisms have for digital audio. He was, as far as I know, the only presenter at the conference to wear and play a banjo during his talk. He used the banjo both to illustrate specific pitches (“hmm, 1000 Hz is about here… twang!“) and to create brief musical interludes between segments of his talk. Every three minutes or so he would explain something about the ear and I would think “holy cow it does that?” After hearing this talk I came away strongly doubting that hearing was actually possible at all, the evidence of my ears to the contrary. A funny story about Deep Note: Moorer wrote Deep Note using a program, and while the overall shape of the sound was predetermined, many of the characteristics were randomly generated. He ran the program until it generated something good, then gave the sound to the THX people, who promptly lost it. When they asked to get another copy of the sound, Moorer didn’t have it any more, and he had to run the program a bunch more times to get it to put out something relatively similar to the original sound.

The most exciting talk was called “What’s So Great About Tamarin?” given by Lars Hansen, Edwin Smith, and Jeff Dyer. Tamarin is the open source version of the virtual machine that runs ActionScript in Player 9. It’s very cool in its current form, but what made this talk exciting was the future directions for Tamarin, particularly Tamarin-Tracing. Edwin Smith spent a good chunk of time explaining in some detail what tracing actually is. I have to admit I only understood about 60% of it at best, but here’s the basic idea. AVM1, the virtual machine for Flash 8, was only an interpreter. AVM2 is a JIT compiler like Java and provides a major speedup vs AVM1 at the cost of some flexibility and compatibility with existing JavaScript out on the web. But Tamarin-Tracing will be the best of both worlds: it will interpret existing JavaScript correctly, profile it on the fly, and compile the hotspots as needed. The result will be a virtual machine that is as flexible and compatible as an interpreter but as fast or faster than a JIT compiler. Tamarin will become part of Firefox 4, and going forward we should see that browser start to execute JavaScript much, much faster than it currently does. It’s interesting to ask about how this might actually level out some of the Flash Player’s competitive advantage against AJAX programming in the browser.

And the scariest talk was given by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, who explained why Amazon.com went into the web services business with S3, EC2, and SQS. The quick answer: because they needed that level of distributed high-reliability, incrementally scalable architecture in order to build their own products. The reason the talk was scary is that it’s clear that building software that way is going to be a big challenge, but it’s definitely the future. Around here people are starting to use the term “Werner-like” to describe a distributed scalable architecture. I love it when new stuff gets under our skin that way.

Bottom line: the Tech Summit really helped me see how much Adobe values their technical staff, and how committed Adobe is to being a great software company. Plus I’m still reeling from how deep the expertise goes in the people I work with.

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