Last weekend, a few dozen developers gathered together at Viget’s beautiful offices in Reston to… talk nerdy. Out of all the conferences I’ve been to, it was one of the best. It was directly honed on developers, and all talks were targeted as such. That meant no talks about marketing, gov 2.0, branding, public relations, blogging, twitter, or anything else social media/PR, etc. as *camps and other conferences I’ve attended recently have moved towards (I’m not counting language-specific conferences).
I had taken notes, but Peter did a better job, so read his.
A few key takeways:
- Jay Virdy, CEO of Summize, kept repeating Build something simple, let the market pull you in – Brad Burnham . As soon as he accepted that, Summize turned itself into a simple Twitter search engine, and took off.
- HTML5 will likely have standards for push notifications (a la Google Wave). Comet is a current implementation. No more of this polling shit.
- Ruby 1.9 is a huge step ahead, but will pose problems for legacy apps.
- Impromptu, Lily, PureData are pretty cool tools for manipulating sound/visuals, even by reading a website. Much cooler if you want to spring for a Monome
Some link love:
