Presented by

  • Phillip Davis

    Phillip Davis

    Phillip is a worker-owner at MBOA, where he is part of the development team building free communication software like JMP and Cheogram. He tries to turn his quote-unquote "rabbit-holes" into contributions to other projects in the open-source community. Current fun-fact: the syntax of the Sumerian noun-phrase is not entirely unlike lisp's.

Abstract

Mental models become more valuable the harder they are to acquire. This is especially true in relatively low-level work with protocols like XMPP, where the convenience of abstracting over the wire format is too efficient pass up. But as developers, we should also have delightful tools for exploring the raw XML that actually underlies all of this, and these tools should be useful in our daily work. Join me on my misguided quest through automated testing generators, context-free grammars, and somehow embedding the .NET runtime in Ruby. Maybe at the end, we'll have the tool we all deserve, but no promises.