Last month Google hosted the first of its Google I/O conferences in San Francisco. I’d like to report that I was there, but I wasn’t (although I did watch the keynote the day after it was given). The video recordings of the speakers (hosted on YouTube) and their slides (mostly shared on Google Docs) that have been on-line for a few weeks now. With term finally over, I can become a virtual conference delegate and today was my first chance to catch up with some of the more interesting talks. If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ll note that I watched/will be watching:
- Steve Yegge’s presentation on Server-Side Scripting with Rhino [more philosophy than technology]
- Guido van Rossum’s demonstration of the Google App Engine
- Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (Google) telling the world about Google’s open source project hosting platform
- Aaron Boodman’s and Chris Prince’s talks about [Google] Gears and its potential for implementing parts of HTML 5 and extending the web browser
- John Skidgel and Lindsey Simon on engaging web app users [with Google App Engine, but I’m sure that the lessons are universal] and
- Josh Bloch on the new Effective Java book.
There are lots more talks to view and lessons to be learnt, and it’d be great if more big companies and conference organizers did this sort of thing.
