Google IO 2008

I’m glad I live in the Silicon Valley! The best part about living here is the opportunity to mingle with like minded people. Since its the summer and classes are over(yippie!), I went to the Google IO conference, google’s developer event at San Francisco’s Moscone West Center.It was 2 days of extensive coverage of various aspects of google’s technologies. This year, the emphasis seemed to be on:
1. Google App Engine(Duh!)
2. Android
3. Open Social.
4. Google Web Toolkit
5. Google API’s like the maps API, etc.

The talks I attended over the 2 days were:

1. Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud – Vic Gundotra :- The keynote session was called “Client, Connectivity and the Cloud” and Vic spoke about how Google, being primarily an internet based company, cares about moving the internet forward. This benefits both Google and us, the users of the internet. Fair enough.

Vic announced a few things about the Google app engine’s tentative pricing model, new release of the google web toolkit, which is now compatible with Java 5 and a few announcements about Google gears and the OpenSocial API. Check this blog for details about the announcements.

2. Painless Python for Proficient Programmers – Alex Martelli :- This was a 2 session talk, part 1 was a basic introduction to the python syntax, books about Python, Python in comparison with Java and C++, and so on.
Session 2 was a little more technical and was pretty interesting for me, probably because I don’t know python , I’m sure someone who knew python would get bored, as Alex himself announced at the beginning of the talk.

Python seems to have a command line interpreter as well to crank out quick implementations and test out ideas, which is really useful. After being exposed to a similar interpreter with Scala, I was curious why Java doesn’t have a similar interpreter, turns out there is one, called “bean shell” . I highly recommend this to smart programmers who don’t want to go through the pain of creating a class, typing the lousy public static void main blah blah just to try out some string manipulation, etc.

3. Open Source is Magic – Chris DiBona :- Chris’ talk was a general one, but really funny. Chris is a personality for sure! Chris has a long history of being involved with open source projects and is now the Open Source program manager at Google. He spoke about how open source works at Google and why Google supports Open Source. Also, he also spoke about the Summer of Code program at Google and a similar program for high school kids called “Google Highly open Participation contest“. Interesting talk over all. Also, Chris was the Principal Speaker at out Department’s Convocation this month. I wasn’t there though .

4. Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions – Jeff Dean :- This was a really fascinating talk. Rarely do we get to hear detailed descriptions about Google’s infrastructure and how they handle massive requests the way they do. Jeff Dean has been at Google since 1999 and has done a lot of amazing work.
He covered a lot of fascinating topics like Google’s implementation of Mapreduce and BigTable, how new employees at Google get comfortable with the infrastructure, the programming languages used at Google, etc. A detailed description is available here.

5. Monetizing Application Traffic On Social Network – Sourabh Niyogi :- This talk by one of the founders of Social Media was not at all what I expected out of the talk. I went in thinking that this would be a generic talk where the focus would be on monetizing strategies for a person who has an application which is social networking oriented, but this talk turned out to be basically on the lines of ” if you develop apps for facebook, myspace or hi5, come to us and we’ll put ads on your application and send you a check every month” which was pretty lousy.  What sucks more is this was my first talk for Thursday and all I could think of sitting in the talk is, how much longer until lunch time !?

6. GWT Extreme – Ray Cromwell :- Ray spoke about some of the advantages of GWT over regular Javascript, for those who dont know, GWT(Google Web TOolkit) is a web framework which compiles to highly optimized Javascript and makes it very easy to write fast, ajax based applications. The code looks like the code one would normally write for a swing based application and being so, programmer productivity is pretty high.
Ray compared JQuery with GWTQuery and showed how GwtQuery uses annotations and compilation to get a 7:1 code size decrease when compared to jQuery. GWT also uses deferred binding like Ruby which is pretty cool. I’ve really liked everything I’ve seen and heard about GWT and probably will be my framework of choice for any application I develop next for personal use.

I didn’t attend as many talks as I’d have liked because I spent most of my time playing foosball! Believe it or not, this is my first time playing foosball and I loved it! Although I still suck as a player, I loved every minute of it. I also made a lot of good friends while playing, so I had a good crowd to hang out with during the evening’s party on day 1.

The party itself was so much fun, disco lights! Video games! Lots of food and alcohol! I got my fair share of all the action . The concert by Flight of the conchords started around 8.00 pm and went on for a couple hours. I love the funny lyrics the band has, although its not really my kind of music, but it was fun nonetheless.

Also, with the mention of Google comes the recollection of the fact that the people there eat all kinds of awesome food! Life was good at the Moscone west center too! They had three types of menus, The Deli Menu, The Grill Menu and the Mexitali Menu. Did I also mention that they had snacks available all day long?! Fun Fun!

Finally, Thursday was mainly all about the talks, I went to a couple of them but mainly played intense foosball! and it ended around 4.15 in the afternoon and I left feeling really happy about being in the Silicon Valley .

Photos from the event on flickr.com.

2 Screens at last!

I kept wanting to get a second screen for a long time! Finally its here!

Now, I can keep my code up on the bigscreen while i do all the smaller tasks on my laptop window. I’ve been wanting to get one ever since I read this research:

Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks such as editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and one with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch screens.

So, now that I have a 20 inch screen( couldnt afford a bigger one!), lets see how much my “productivity” goes up .

I went to Startup School!

I went to Startup School on Saturday! Being a regular visitor on Hacker News, I applied at the right time and got invited ! The event was at the Stanford Campus and I have to say, its just awesome! I wonder how people there get any studying done . I really had a great time and have already decided to attend the event next year for sure!
There was an impressive line-up of speakers for the event, the list of Speakers:-

Sam Altman,Founder, Loopt:- Hyper excited! Had 8 shots of espresso before the talk apparently But spoke well about how to get funded and so on.

Marc Andreessen,Founder, Ning, Opsware, Netscape; Creator of Mosaic :- Was a Q & A session with Jessica Livingston asking the questions which were submitted online by people. Was a really good talk, one of the better talks during the day.

Michael Arrington,Editor, TechCrunch :- A really popular guy, and presented the talk from a Tech blogger’s perspective but I found the talk boring. Also, the dude had a black eye, I i guess some people don’t like his posts!

Jeff Bezos,Founder, Amazon.com:- This was the longest talk of the event, and I kind of disliked that, the talk was a hour long advertisement of Amazon Web Services! The problem is, everyone there already knew what it was and was using it to some extent or the other, and we wanted more than just an advertisement for it.
Funny moment during the Q & A with Bezos, nervous guy stepped up to the mike and thanked him for gmail .

Paul Buchheit,Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail :- Very interesting talk, Paul speaks in a calm and monotonous manner with some dry sarcasm intermixed. Enjoyed listening to him(although his talk was right before lunch!)

Paul Graham,Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb :- Biggest disappointment of the day for me, the talk felt like PG was just reading out an essay and was really boring, although the talk had some good points in it.

David Heinemeier Hansson,Creator of Rails; Partner, 37Signals :- Clearly the best talk of the day! http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-money-online thats the link and I highly recommend everyone to check it out!

David Lawee,Vice President of Corporate Development, Google; Founder, Xfire :- Was the first talk of the day, interesting talk.

Jack Sheridan,Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati :- Was a talk about the legal aspects of starting your own company, etc, was interesting to a lot of people, but I sheepishly admit that i dozed off during the talk .

Greg McAdoo,Partner, Sequoia Capital:- Really good talk, loved the surfer analogy, although David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk right after this one blew away the surfer analogy!

Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google:- This one again was a disappointment, Peter Norvig is one of my heroes and he gave a boring talk at the end of the day about some probability based algorithm and how to use data to your advantage..may not have been the best topic for the last talk of the day.

All of their talks can be found online on justin.tv here:
http://blog.justin.tv/2008/04/startup-school.html
Techcrunch covered the event and blogged about it, link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/19/packed-house-at-y-combinator-startup-school/

Photos from the event on flikr.com

Later, went with Dave, a linux and hardware hacker to Super Happy Dev House(http://superhappydevhouse.org/)! Met a lot of interesting people there, including Tom Music(founder of http://haikoo.org/), one of the founders of the Ironman game(http://ironmanthegame.marvel.com/index.php), Ani(who’s working on a really cool financial application idea for lending and borrowing money) and a bunch of other people who’s name I don’t remember, as I was really drunk by dinner time! Headed back home around midnight . Definitely one of the best days since I’ve been here in San Jose, Life is Good.