Most tourists like to travel to resorts, amusement parks, or fancy restaurants. I like software parks!

yup, I'm that geeky

May 24, 2008 I attended the 2nd annual developers conference in Huangzhou. I have to say that I was quite impressed with the line up of speakers and with the quality of the presentations. I was always extremely interested to compare how I, a big white westerner, and the local Chinese students interacted within the sessions. Or maybe I should say that lack of interaction within the sessions. I was extremely excited to ask questions, to probe deeper and to really get at the "meat" of the matter(s). The Chinese students seemed bored and also as if they knew all the answers or maybe they just didn't care.

I was cool to attend and to see how the local developers interact and to watch this ecosystem grow. In 10 years (or less, according to the Chinese government) the world is going to see a lot more highly skilled, very talented developers hit the industry.

Working in China, for someone coming from the "West", comes with its own unique set of difficulties. The first difficulty, of course, is the language barrier which may be present even if you speak perfect 普通话 （Mandarin, Chinese) as many Chinese people still speak in local dialects. The second is another obvious one, the cultural differences. Cultural differences may not be apparent at first but they creep up on you and can present interesting challenges from time to time. 

The biggest challenge/difficult when working in China may not be these obvious ones but rather these things that we take for granted in the "West". 

1) 24 hour power. Power at all isn't always guaranteed even in the big cities. I know of several technology shops that have regular power outages. How does a tech-company operate without power? answer, it doesn't.

2) Internet access. Yes you have the challenges of the great firewall and the impositions it places but you also massive inconsistencies with the web itself. You may be paying for a 2MB line but there is no guarantee that you are going to get that or anywhere near that. Now when you combine spotty Internet with the fact that most of the Internet is hosted outside of China you get a really bad combination for doing any sort of web related work unless, that is, your web is 100% focused on China, your hosted in China and all of your resources are within China; a highly unlikely scenario even for China-based sites/companies.  

As an example of one of the challenges, I uploaded 100MBs of file to a server in the U.S, the upload was done on a 2MB up/down business class ADSL line. The picture shows my upload times. As you can see one 34 MB file took 2 1/2 hours to upload, at a whopping 3.8KB/s but roughly 2 hours later a 13MB file took only 4 minutes at a, moderately faster, 54.7KB/s. This sort of inconsistency reigns supreme here and its just something that, for the moment, you just have to live with.  

Doing any sort of web-based work in China is, in a word, challenging.   

This past weekend was Barcamp Shanghai. Not great the same as the US camps but great nonetheless. I had a good time and I can't wait for the next one.

Can you tell that I'm not much of a blogger? no... time..

Yes its true I do speak a little Chinese and a lot of horrible Chinese. At our last Drupal meetup in Beijing I was stuck as the only presenter and I didn't have an interpreter handy so it was just me and a room full of Chinese Drupal folks just waiting for me to speak. Very intimidating but I think I managed to get my point across.

These videos only prove one thing. I need practice!