Airplay Dojo

by admin on June 6, 2011 at 10:53 pm

I’ve been working on Airplay SDK for Ideaworks3d for 6 months now, and it’s been a blast. I’ve learned a crazy amount about all sort of deep and dirty technical areas, and become an order of magnitude more productive using the GNU GCC toolchain, vi, python and git. My focus is better and I can work harder for longer than ever before. These things are all linked- the more I learn, the more interested I am, and the more interested I am, the less I need to eat cakes and watch DVD box sets by the carton.

On thursday I gave a 30 minute presentation to the London Python Dojo about Airplay SDK, and some work some colleagues and I did on porting python and creating some bindings. The project is hosted at https://github.com/guy127917/python-airplay. It’s kind of raw at the moment, but we have some basic stuff running, and the slow down doesn’t seem too bad for 3d stuff, so it looks promising. Some of the bindings require changes to the SDK which aren’t available to the public right now, but let me know if that is an issue and I’ll see what we can do.

The presentation went quite well I think, I guess it was more of a talk than a presentation since I didn’t take any slides. I didn’t really get through everything that I wanted to- 30 minutes absolutely flew by! So moral of the story is, though you may be able to wing it, it’s better to have some structure. The main reason I didn’t do more preparation is because I spent all my time getting a tech demo running, which only accounted for about 15 seconds of the talk. An iPad is a lot less impressive than a projector in front of a crowd!

I really appreciate having the opportunity to present though, so thanks to the Dojo and Mr Tollervey for giving me the chance. I really enjoyed it and hopefully can do something similar in the future. I actually wrote about wanting to do some talks not very long ago, so it’s nice to see a bit of progress there.

In fact, that post has reminded me why I like writing things down from time to time- it makes the whole “I was such an idiot 2 years ago, now I’m MUCH wiser” mentality more transparent and you can see it and isolate it if it is causing issues. So hopefully I will write more regularly in the future (famous last blog words).