I've spent some time recently with DTrace, a performance analysis and debugging framework that ships on every Mac running Leopard. It's an extremely powerful framework that many Cocoa programmers disregard due to its apparent complexity.

We will be having another meeting of the Madison, WI CocoaHeads group tomorrow, March 24th, at 6:30 PM on the UW-Madison campus. We'll be in the Computer Sciences Building, room CS 1240 once again.

Based on local interest, my coworker, Pete Johnson, has started a chapter of CocoaHeads to be based in Madison, WI. I'll be helping out as a speaker and organizer for the group.

We had a good turnout at the inaugural CocoaHeads meeting in Madison, WI last night (Maurice Cheeks snapped a photo of the event). The general theme was about getting started with Cocoa development on the iPhone. I mentioned some resources for this during the talk, and by request I'd like to list those here.

I am now back home in Wisconsin after attending the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. As a first-time attendee, I wasn't sure what to expect, but this ended up being a great experience. From the things I learned, to the people I met, I consider it well worth the price of admission.

I have been doing software development, mainly custom in-house industrial or scientific projects, for a little while now and have worked in many languages: BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Scheme, PHP, etc. I now do almost all of my coding, for this company or for my day job, in the Objective-C language using the Cocoa frameworks. Aside from the GNUStep project, Objective C and Cocoa are only used on Apple's products: the Macintosh computers and (soon) the iPhone and iPod Touch. Why would I limit myself to such a small subset of all computing hardware?