Damian wow-ed the Webstock crowd last year and he’s back again, this time to close the conference out. He’s also conducting a workshop called Presentation Aikido. Patently stung by his loss in Powerpoint Karaoke Idol last year to home-town hero Nat Torkington, Damian has spent the last year studying presentation skills and is here to share those at his workshop.

We caught up with Damian for a few questions.

Webstock: You’ve apparently got something to do with Perl! What is Perl? What does it do? Why is it important?

Damian: Perl is a general purpose programming language with roots in the C programming language and the Unix shell and utilities. It’s often called “the duct tape of the Internet” because sysadmins and web developers have been using it for the past twenty years to solve all those tricky “in between” problems (of patching together incompatible system components, of coordinating them, and of interconverting data amongst them); tasks for which C is too tedious and shell scripts too cumbersome.

Quite a few useful web technologies nowadays rely on Perl, including Slash, Bugzilla, RT, TWiki, ACT, Majordomo, SATAN, and Movable Type. It’s also at the core of many major businesses and projects, such as the BBC, Amazon, LiveJournal, Ticketmaster, Slashdot, Craigslist, eBay, the Human Genome Project, NASA, The Oxford dictionary, and IMDb. The PHP language grew out of a set of Perl scripts that Rasmus Lerdorf had been using to manage his personal home page. Likewise, Yukihiro Matsumoto originally developed the Ruby language as an evolution of Perl.

Perl’s major strengths are its high-level programming power, its flexibility and adaptability, and the very strong developer community it has gathered. It also comes with a huge on-line library (known as “CPAN”), which provides nearly 15,000 open source software modules ready-made to solve a vast array of real-world problems.

Webstock: What sort of “mindset” makes for the best programmers? Can anyone become a good coder with enough work?

Damian: Sure. In fact, the only way you can become a good coder is with enough work. The problem, though, is that “enough work” isn’t by itself enough. You also have to have a fundamental aptitude for–and an innate pleasure in–the art and craft of programming. That is, unless you actually enjoy spending your time in the (often-tedious) activity of software development, you’ll never have the incentive or motivation to put in the “enough work” needed to become good at it.

That’s the only mindset necessary, but it’s an uncommon and self-contradictory one. You need the passion and unreasoning optimism requisite to any act of creation, combined with the practicality, patience, and dogged attention-to-detail necessary to convert your grand vision into a set of accurate instructions. You need to be at once in love with the notion of magicking useful tools out of nothing more than clever arrangements of language, and at the same time be dedicated, persistent, and sceptical enough to arrange that language with sufficient care and precision so that it actually works.

It’s that all-too-rare combination–of romantic and pragmatist, of wizard and engineer–that makes for the very best programmers.

Webstock: When the list of great presenters is made, it would be fair the say that computer scientists and programmers are not going to be over-represented. And yet, here you are doing a workshop on “Presentation Aikido”. What’s been your journey? How have you become a great presenter?

Damian: Hmmmmmmmmm. I’m pretty sure that the single most important thing is never to believe anyone who tells you you’ve become a great presenter. That’s instantly fatal. Because, as soon as you sit back and think you’re there, you’ll stop giving the 100% effort that it takes to create and deliver a truly great presentation.

In other words, the way that you become a great presenter is the same way you become a great programmer, or a great sportsperson, or a great artist, or a great almost anything else: you start with some predilection for the particular activity, and perhaps a little natural ability, and then you work like fury for the rest of your life, gradually gaining the experience and honing the skills and refining the style you need to excel.

Unfortunately, being a great presenter is exactly as Edison described every other kind of creative act: 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Of course, when you do it for a living, you eventually discover most of the short-cuts and tricks that allow you to perspire more productively, and you develop a routine and a set of techniques that help the inspiration flow as well. And it’s those short-cuts and techniques that I’m planning to share in my “Presentation Aikido” workshop at Webstock.

Webstock: Who is going to benefit most from your workshop? And what should they expect from it?

Damian: First of all, this isn’t a workshop for those who “have to” give better presentations; this is a workshop for those who “want to” give better presentations…but who are uncertain how to do that, or who lack confidence in their abilities, or who are just downright scared of public speaking. In other words, you don’t have to be a good speaker already, or even an average speaker already, to benefit from this class, but you do have to genuinely aspire to be better. As long as someone has the will, this workshop can help them find the way.

What they should expect is a lot of practical help: that I will walk them through an effective process for designing good presentations; give them numerous tips, suggestions, and insights drawn from real
experience; sprinkle in a few cautionary war-stories; show them plenty of demonstrations and examples; and offer them lots of opportunities to ask the questions that matter to them, as well as to get one-to-one feedback from me on their own presentations and skills.

Oh, they should definitely also expect to have fun: if I’m talking about giving great presentations, you can be sure that I’m going to work extra hard to ensure that that presentation is itself great.

Webstock: What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? More of the same, or have you got some new plans?

Damian: I still love what I’m doing now, so I intend to keep on teaching, and training, and speaking, and writing as long as people still want to hear from me. Of course, what I’ll be teaching in five years time will likely be very different from what I’m teaching now.

For example, with an entirely new version of Perl (Perl 6) likely to be released later this year, there is a whole new universe of programming concepts and techniques that I’m looking forward to sharing with the wider technical community.

But I’m equally sure that in five years time the Web will continue to be so full of bad design, poor usability, and general oppression of the ordinary user that I’ll still have plenty of targets and plenty of ammunition for those scathing Webstock keynotes I so enjoy delivering.

Webstock: Thanks Damian! And if anyone is thinking about signing up for Damian’s workshop, don’t hesitate – it will truly be a worthwhile investment.

One of the names generating a lot of excitement for Webstock is that of Bruce Sterling. It’s his first trip to New Zealand and there’s already lots of interest in his presentation. We interviewed Bruce recently, with a little help from Nat Torkington in putting the questions together.

Webstock: Did you always want to be a writer?

Bruce: No. Now that I think about it, my supposed urges to “be something” were always based in everybody around me assuring me that I had to “be” in some profession. I’m sure glad I didn’t go into any of the lines of work that were recommended when I was a teenager.

Webstock: Have you been writing as long as you can remember?

Bruce: Not really, no. I don’t do a lot of writing for writing’s sake — I’ve never been much good as a diarist. I tend to write about specific topics I find of compelling interest.

Webstock: What were the first books you fell in love with, and why?

Bruce: I don’t want to sound contrarian here, but I don’t think that my deep long-term, abiding interest in encyclopedias and reference texts qualifies as “love.”

Webstock: Any advice for those of us raising kids in 2009? What should we be fostering in them, letting them do, exposing them to?

Bruce: Well, it’s certainly important to have children. And, no matter how anxious you feel about them, it’s also important to understand that they are human beings like you, and therefore more rugged than they look.

I think you should try to set your children a good example by involving them in your daily life. They always remember that much better than they remember any “lessons” or “exposures” or “quality time.”

Webstock: What cities most embody the future, and why?

Bruce: Well, no city ever embodies an absolute future, but there are cities in certain periods that clearly embody the trends driving that period.

It’s not a surprise to tell people that London, Paris, and New York are important now, and that things
are happening there now that will spread widely.

But I would also recommend a close look at Berlin, Baghdad, Mumbai, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco,
and Mexico City. Also Dubai and Shanghai. Dubai and Shanghai are kind of the comedy tag-team of futuristic cities.

Mind you, I don’t choose to live in any of those places. Basically, I live in Belgrade, Austin and Torino. These towns don’t seem to have much in common, but they’re all the same size and rather similar geographically. I wouldn’t call them great metropolises destined to dominate futurity, but they are three places that each somehow feel like a home to me.

Webstock: We’re losing the boundary between the online and the offline worlds as more devices are networked and become sensors or displays for the Internet. If you were product development king at Microgooglehoo or one of the three-inital Chinese hardware manufacturers, what would you be creating with this technology?

Bruce: Well, you’d have to be king, because if you build anything that out-thinks the demands of the next quarter, the shareholders will kill you.

Of course, now that the shareholders are jumping out of windows themselves, maybe you have a chance to innovate.

If I really had to choose here, I think I’d go for the Google philosophy: hire many smart people, give them some free time to build anything they want, and try to ramp up the successes. Throw a bowl of cheap spaghetti at the wall, and see whatever sticks.

Of course, business-school graduates will punish you for this sensible approach, because it shows a lack of serious devotion to core competencies, and lacks a unique value proposition. That’s why those poseurs should never run tech companies. In fact at this point I’m unsure what they SHOULD run; if they all retired to monasteries, our quality of life would likely boom.

If I have to focus on one line of tech development, I’d say green energy apps. That’s very hard work, but if we don’t get there, nothing else is going to matter much.

If you give me a second choice, cellphone banking for the Third World. In fact, any kind of democratized banking that isn’t like modern banking. Probably the best place to build such a thing is in an area that has never had any banks. Someplace poor, peaceful and honest. Okay, those three social qualities never go together; you can have two of ’em, but never all three in the same place. But there’s gotta be some good locale for a useful start-up like that… use Google Maps!

Webstock: Thanks Bruce! It’s going to be a pleasure to have you here in February.

We talked with Emily Loughnan, Managing Director of Wellington based interactive media company, Clicksuite.

Webstock: Click Suite is one of the older web, or “new media”, companies around. Tell us about how Click Suite started and some of its history?

Emily: We started when Rex and I went to a television industry conference and heard about how TV would be interactive in the future. We were both blown away by what interactivity would do for audiences (removing the old passive couch-potato viewing experience and really involving the
audience).

We were so excited by this (and boring to be around because it’s all we talked about!) that just two weeks later we sent in the registration to form a company.

That was late 1993.

Since then we have lead (and followed) with a wide variety of technologies that deliver interactivity. These days the web is commonly featured in our portfolio, but we’re also doing work in digital sculptures, interactive displays, and in new user interfaces etc. It’s a VERY exciting industry to be in – it’s always challenging and changing.

Webstock: AS someone who could genuinely be called a veteran (and we mean that in the best possible sense!), what’s the current state of the NZ web scene?

Emily: I think we’re doing some great great stuff in NZ. We’ve (kiwis in general) made websites that really are innovative, there’s a lot for NZ to be proud of. I know from our own experience that we showed someone in the BBC a site we made here, and he was blown away at how much more efficiently we did it compared to one they made with similar functionality – and how much better it was in terms of quality.

That said, we need to keep innovating. To do that you need great people, but you also need brave clients, or backers. (They’re on my Santa list)

Webstock: What are some of the changes you see happening to the industry in the next 5 years? What are the sort of things we’ll be working on?

Emily: The really exciting developments in touchscreen and even gestural, or natural, interfaces means how we interact with the web is going to change. That means we are all going to have to think about a new paradigm in user experience because as the interface evolves, so too does the audience.

Webstock: Click Suite is associated with Jane McGonigal at Webstock. Tell us why you made that choice.

Emily: Well sometimes games are a great way to connect with certain audiences. We have quite a bit of experience in that space, and we are interested in Jane’s knowledge and experience. Besides, I fancy coffee with a futurist.

Webstock: This is Click Suite’s first time as a Webstock sponsor. What made you decide to become involved?

Emily: we have some serious webstock fans here. You could call it peer-to-peer pressure 😉

Webstock: Heh! Thanks Emily.

We talked with Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google.

Webstock: Chris, you manage the Open Source program at Google. Tell us a little about the aim of this program and your role in it.

Chris: We have two major foci in the group: First, understand that Google uses a fair amount of open source licensed software, and we ensure that Google is compliant with open source licenses. Second, we are tasked with broadly supporting the open source developer community. We do this by creating hundreds of new developers each year through the Summer of Code, releasing over a million lines of Google code into the wild each year and providing infrastructure to over 160k open source projects on code.google.com.

Webstock: Can open source save the world? And is it just about software – are there lessons that can be applied in other fields?

Chris: No. Only people can save the world. But using open source software, they can do so while still maintaining control of their computers. Preserving their software destiny, if you will.

Webstock: Most people have some vision of what working at Google must be like – the free food, the smart people, the free food. What’s an aspect of working at Google that people wouldn’t expect?

Chris: Actually, I prefer people look at the computer science we do, but that’s hard to do from outside the company. I’m personally very excited about our work on renewable energy through our Google.org subsidiary. In particular, Geothermal gets me pretty excited. The food is pretty tasty, though…

Webstock: You’ve been to New Zealand a few times now. What’s your impression of the NZ web and software scene?

Chris: I think that New Zealand is doing something very right. For a country the size New Zealand is to have such a presence in web development, and in technology in general, is remarkable.

Webstock: Finally, Google is the premier sponsor for Webstock (which we’re extremely pleased about!). But why? What does Google get from sponsoring an event such as Webstock?

Chris: We feel that webstock is the premier event in the southern hemisphere for reaching out to our friends in web development. We look forward to meeting people there each year.

Webstock: Thanks Chris!

We talked recently with Annalee Newitz, geek, writer and all-round sci-fi fan-girl.

Webstock: You get to blog about things like, “Ten of the Kinkiest Science Fiction Books You’ll Ever Read”. You must, surely, have the best job in the world. Can you tell us a little about what you do?

Annalee: My primary focus these days is running io9.com, a blog about science fiction and science that’s part of the Gawker Media network. I work with a team of writers, and every day we deliver a mix of entertainment news in the scifi world, as well as details on the coolest new scientific discoveries. We post about 25-30 times per day, with a little less on weekends, so we tend to spend workdays on tight deadlines, exchanging a million little messages on IM or in our Campfire online meeting room. My job as editor-in-chief is to keep the whole ship running: I write, I edit, I balance the budget, and I try to stay in touch with editors at related blogs to let them know when we’ve posted something interesting.

Oh and then in the times when I’m not doing that, I freelance for Popular Science and New Scientist, and I’m writing a book. Just call me a graphomaniac.

Webstock: What’s coming in the next 10 years that really really scares you?

Annalee: I think the scenario that scares me most is one of runaway poverty, combined with climate change that wrecks traditional food sources like farms and oceans. Octavia Butler wrote a very believable set of books called Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents which describe a near-future United States whose government has collapsed. Gangs are competing with evangelical terrorists for control of local areas, and poverty has exacerbated political differences to the point where violence is part of everyday life. Some might say these novels are about the conditions of the developing world coming to the developed world. I think Butler’s scenario illustrates my biggest fear. Which is that we’ll make choices over the next decade that permanently destroy our ability to develop the planet so we can provide education, health care, renewable energy, and decent livelihoods for everyone.

Webstock: Is the election of Barack Obama the beacon of hope that so many outside of America look to?

Annalee: Well, he’s better than the other guy! But he’s a politician, and has made some poor choices when it comes to tech and science policy, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much.

Webstock: Who are the four people, living or dead, you’d invite to your ideal dinner party, and why?

Annalee: Tonight’s ideal dinner party will include early feminist and scifi author Alice B. Sheldon (AKA James Tiptree, Jr.), whose life I’ve been eagerly reading about in Julie Phillips’ fantastic biography. She’d probably have a lot to talk about with second dinner guest, the software compiler geek Grace Hopper. They were both in the military at a time when few women were – and they were both pretty geeky science types at a time when women were pushed out of labs and into the home. Along with the two of them, it would be fun to have deposed Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who has argued repeatedly that women don’t possess a natural aptitude for science. I’d love to see them slap him around. Finally, I’d invite my partner in crime Charlie Jane Anders, since she makes delightful conversation and would love to see Larry get slapped around by Alice and Grace too.

Webstock: On the apocryphal desert island, you’re allowed one book, one CD and one movie. What would they be?

Annalee: Several terabyte drives containing every book ever written, plus my entire music and video collections? Can I say that?

Webstock: Hardly in the spirit of the question! But a suitably geeky and appropriate answer. We’re looking forward to seeing you here in February!