[DevoxxFR2012] Portrait of the Developer as “The Artist”
Lecturer
Patrick Chanezon serves as a principal advocate for developer ecosystems and cloud innovation. At the time of this presentation, he managed the Client and Cloud Advocacy team at VMware, following a distinguished tenure at Google where he shaped developer relations from 2005 onward. His responsibilities encompassed fostering communities around OpenSocial, Google Checkout, the AdWords API, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), and Google App Engine. Prior to Google, Patrick contributed significantly to Sun Microsystems, AOL, and Netscape, focusing on portals, blogging platforms, and RSS syndication technologies. He co-founded the ROME open-source Java project for feed parsing and established the Open Source Get Together Paris (OSSGTP) group, which laid foundational groundwork for France’s vibrant Java community. His early career included consulting roles at Accenture and Netscape in France, where he maintained legacy COBOL systems before embracing the web’s transformative potential and relocating to California. Patrick’s passion for open standards, community building, and technical evangelism has positioned him as a bridge between enterprise constraints and innovative platforms.
Abstract
In a compelling analogy drawn from Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar-winning film The Artist, Patrick Chanezon explores the seismic shifts reshaping software development through the lens of three technologies that reached critical mass between 2010 and 2012: mobile computing, HTML5-enabled browsers, and cloud platforms. He traces the developer’s journey from the rigid, complexity-laden enterprise Java environments of the early 2000s to the agile, platform-agnostic, user-focused paradigms of the cloud era. Through personal anecdotes, industry case studies, and technical deep dives, Patrick dissects outdated practices, champions open-source PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry, and outlines actionable strategies for developers to adapt, innovate, and thrive. The presentation culminates in a vision of the developer as an entrepreneurial protagonist, scripting their own triumphant narrative in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
The Silent Era of Enterprise Java: A Developer’s Origin Story
Patrick Chanezon opens his narrative in the Hollywood of 1927, as depicted in The Artist, where George Valentin, a silent film star, faces professional obsolescence with the advent of talkies. This cinematic transition serves as a powerful metaphor for the developer’s confrontation with disruptive technologies. Just as Valentin must adapt his craft or fade into irrelevance, developers in 2012 stand at a crossroads defined by mobile, HTML5, and cloud computing—innovations that, having achieved critical mass over the preceding two years, demand profound professional reinvention.
To ground this analogy, Patrick recounts his own professional odyssey, beginning in the early 2000s at Accenture in France. There, he maintained COBOL-based billing systems for France Télécom, a role he humorously notes likely left traces in millions of French phone bills. The web’s explosive growth in the late 1990s prompted his move to Netscape, where he witnessed the internet’s democratization firsthand. A subsequent relocation to California with his wife placed him at the epicenter of technological innovation, first at Sun Microsystems and then at Google, where he spent six years building developer ecosystems around APIs and Google App Engine. His most recent transition, in September 2011, brought him to VMware to lead advocacy for Cloud Foundry—an open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) launched by former Google engineers.
This personal trajectory mirrors the broader evolution of the developer archetype, embodied in the fictional “George.” In 2002 Paris, George toiled within SSII (Sociétés de Services en Ingénierie Informatique) firms, crafting enterprise Java applications using servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), WebLogic clustering, Java Message Service (JMS), Oracle databases, and JavaServer Faces (JSF). Projects like the infamous “Azerti”—a three-year endeavor whose purpose even George couldn’t fully articulate—exemplified the era’s hallmarks: convoluted workflows, unusable interfaces, and code so complex that only its author could navigate it. Despite these flaws, deployment was celebrated by IT directors, and George, reveling in his indispensability, was promoted to project manager. Patrick critiques this “wallowing in complexity,” a phrase echoing Pierre Pezziardi’s earlier Devoxx talk, as a systemic failure to prioritize user experience.
Promotion, however, severed George from coding. Confined to writing specifications in windowed offices, he rarely engaged with users, whom he dismissed as perpetually dissatisfied. By 2004, attending OSSGTP meetings exposed him to agile methodologies and open-source frameworks—Groovy, REST, AspectJ, Hibernate, Spring—but these innovations felt irrelevant to his WebLogic-centric world. Agile coaches courted his budget, yet George prioritized golf and executive schmoozing over technical growth. Within two years, he hadn’t touched code, managing a 30-developer team and launching a misconceived three-year “agile plan” predicated on exhaustive documentation rather than iterative delivery. This stagnation, Patrick argues, parallels Valentin’s refusal to embrace sound, risking professional irrelevance.
The Talkies Arrive: Mobile, HTML5, and Cloud as Disruptive Forces
The presentation shifts to the technological “talkies” upending development. Mobile computing, catalyzed by Apple’s App Store in 2008 and Android’s open ecosystem, has made smartphones ubiquitous, outshipping PCs and enabling constant connectivity. HTML5, maturing as a W3C standard, unifies web development by replacing plugin-dependent rich interfaces (Flash, Silverlight) with native browser capabilities—canvas, WebSockets, local storage, and offline support. Cloud platforms abstract infrastructure, allowing developers to deploy applications without managing servers, storage, or networking.
Patrick illustrates cloud’s transformative potential through a real-world incident: Amazon Web Services’ 2011 outage, which crippled startups like Reddit, Foursquare, and Quora. Rather than indicting cloud reliability, he praises the resilience of survivors who architected distributed systems atop Amazon’s IaaS. These efforts birthed PaaS—a higher abstraction layer managing applications and services rather than virtual machines. Google App Engine, launched in 2008, initially faced ridicule for its platform-centric vision, yet within four years, the industry converged on PaaS as the developer’s future.
Competitive offerings proliferated: Salesforce acquired Heroku for its Ruby focus; CloudBees emphasized continuous integration; Amazon introduced Elastic Beanstalk; Microsoft pushed Azure; and VMware launched Cloud Foundry. Enterprises, wary of vendor lock-in and desiring hybrid cloud capabilities, gravitated toward open-source solutions. Cloud Foundry, Apache-licensed and multilingual (natively supporting Java, Scala, Ruby, Node.js; community extensions adding Python, PHP, .NET), emerged as the “Linux of the cloud.” It ships with MySQL and PostgreSQL, allows arbitrary service binding, and operates multicloud via public providers (vmwarecloudfoundry.com, AppFog) or private deployments. The BOSH tool, open-sourced in 2012, simplifies cluster management across Amazon, OpenStack, or vSphere.
Patrick contrasts proprietary lock-in with open-source empowerment through a striking example. A Google App Engine bug requesting PHP support languished for three years with over 1,000 comments, ultimately rejected. In contrast, two weeks after Cloud Foundry’s 2011 launch, a developer submitted a pull request adding PHP, immediately benefiting the ecosystem. Community contributions further extended support to Smalltalk, Erlang, and Haskell, demonstrating open-source velocity.
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