Wired On Friday: San Francisco dance clubs have long been home to strange sights, but few have been as deeply incongruous with the decor as the scene at Club NV last weekend.
Picture 200 or so geeks, dressed in product T-shirts, squinting at laptops, squirming on uncomfortable chairs in the dark of the dance floor. Or else leaning over the railings of the VIP rooms above, sipping Red Bull and peering at a scrolling chunk of esoteric hieroglyphics on a video screen.
There's a conspicuous lack of dancing here - unless you include the fast tip-tap of fingers on laptops. Surrounding the crowd, true enough, are the high-pitched screams of something that sounds similar to, but not quite, dance music. But no: it's just the demonstration bleeps of a new piece of software, which is quickly shut down as its creator continues his explanation of how this "parametric path graphical panning components" controlling an "eight-channel sound array" via "b-format ambisonics".
This is CodeCon, a hyper-intensive, three-day convention held for the techiest of techies. From Friday to Sunday, five speakers a day trot onto a hastily constructed set in one of San Francisco's more upmarket nightclubs, to reveal new code and insights to programmers keen to keep on the cutting edge of their trade.
It's a barebones event. There are no sponsors, and no marketing spiel. Unused nightclub space is cheap during the day: hence the venue. There are no free lunches, no expensive freebies. The organisers aim to break even with 200 attendees paying $95 each. There aren't even enough chairs to go around.
Why the privations? And why, despite the no-frills setting, do so many make their way to CodeCon? Because for geeks, this is as close to pure information transfer as conventions can get.
The CodeCon organisers are fiercely puritanical in what they accept and reject. Only developers can speak, and they have to be working on the code they show. The code has to be available for others to see. And it has to be a new and interesting idea.
As ever, those rules lead to a mixed bunch of talks. The current hot buzzwords of Silicon Valley get a showing, with a small startup Mosuki demonstrating a social networking application that's somewhere between Friendster and Microsoft Outlook. You pick out events from the usual event listings. A couple of clicks show all your friends where you're going - but no-one else. Another group of eager hackers showcase their wiki software.
Wikis are a way to create a plain and easy-to-edit Webpage that makes writing documents, rough public outlines of ongoing work or internal business plans a breeze. These developers have been experimenting on an easier way to install a wiki on any server.
Some of the smartest programmers at CodeCon are working on what's shaping up to be the big computing problem of the next five years - version control.
Version control is partly about ensuring that all the edits you do to computer files are saveable (so you can roll back to a previous version if you make a mistake). But more and more these days, it's also about planning how to let hundreds of people work on the same documents without needing a central server, and without overwriting one another's work.
This is an issue close to many coders' hearts. Working out who gets priority when two people are editing the same file is a challenging computer science problem to crack. And bad version control is a fact of life for many CodeCon attendees, who struggle to create their code under exactly the conditions that the problem describes. If they make a mistake in how they code a big program, it's imperative that they can fall back to an unpolluted copy of their previous work. And they'll often be working with many others on the same projects over the Internet, meddling with others' work as freely as they let other programmers view and change their own.
They pepper the creators of two new version control systems - Codeville and Vesta - with detailed questions. Its rare that the creators of such intricate systems explain them in detail to the public. Rarer still that they are asked about precise nuances of their work. To coders with little patience for dressed-up sales pitches and a hunger for big new ideas, CodeCon sounds like a dream come true.
There can be a downside, however. "Presenters must be one of the active developers of the code in question," dictates one of the rules.
The first talk I saw at the inaugural CodeCon, three years ago, was so nervous he barely spoke for minutes at a time, and spent all of his allotted 45 minutes on the edge of tears. Another demo that year consisted almost entirely of the lead speaker struggling to get his code to compile on stage, with fellow techies heckling command line options from the wings.
Most presentations run smoother than that, although the sympathetic cries of "Doh!" whenever a machine crashed were still as common as applause.
Even through the cloud of awkward hackers and fragile programs, though, CodeCon is still one of the few dog-and- pony shows where genuinely new ideas are shown for the first time.
The other - called simply "Demo" - is far more exclusive, invitation-only event firmly aimed at feeding new companies to eager venture capitalists. Demo 2004 took place last week in the more salubrious venue of a spa in Scottsdale, Arizona. Its presentations sounded closer to Siegfried and Roy than the grungy fumblings of CodeCon.
A French company called Total Immersion showcased their product by having a demonstrator walk on stage waving a flower in his hand - except the flower only appeared on the video screen projection of him, not in real life.
Back in the sticky darkness of Club NV, there's none of that razzmatazz. But keep an eye on the sketchy blueprints being floated here: they may be the hot areas that get the Demo treatment in a few year's time. And maybe one day, after they've jumped threw all these hoops, you'll see them on your own PC.
