no, really

I wasn’t invited to go to that Web 2.0 “Summit”, as they’re calling it now. There is some flip-flopping speculation at who should be there – marketers, thinkers, techies. This is probably all because people still don’t know who “owns” Web 2.0.

When you have a quilting convention or an ASP.NET convention, you know who should be going: people who make quilts and people who program in ASP.NET, respectively.

When you have a convention about Web 2.0, who goes? The advertisers will say “It’s ours, Web 2.0 is all about ubiquitous advertising-supported apps.” The tecchies will say “It’s all about us – we make APIs and mashups and Wikis.” And the thinkers will go “Stay away all you underlings! We shaped this whole thing, and now we need to talk about what’s next.”

So, when you get ~200,000 adverting people, ~100,000 tech people, and ~2,000 thinkers trying to barge down the doors and take control, things get a little manic.

Thanks to the magic of Web 2.0’s blogverse, I can get some impression if it all from Ed Yourdon . My interpretation: big, unweildy, disorganized, eminently useful. The “new style” of conference, like we’ve done with nextNY seems to be their format of choice.

Again, all of this hoopla seems very Cali-centric. How do we get the word out in NY? I need to figure out how to get in contact with some of the named tech folks in NY like Ed and Joel. Their audience in the tech community extends far beyond NY, and if we asked them to blog along their NY audience… we could probably start that kind of buzz in New York.

Must go formuate master plan.

I stumbled upon a particular blog this morning that worried me at first. I don’t like finding out that I’m heading the wrong direction with something, and this one in particular seemed to make me think that I was. I read on, and saw that it wasn’t mocking the processes of agile development, but the people who have made it a religion.

Amongst the quotes that I was very pleased to see – particularly from a guy who went from “bitter” to “google”, was this:

“And optimal productivity is partly a function of the machine and context in which you’re operating: the quality of your code base, your tools, your documentation, your computing platform, your teammates, even the quality of the time you have during the day, which should be food-filled and largely free of interrupts.”

That sounds like: support your people so they have no blockages.

Overall, I think his thesis is “do what’s right for your people, make sure they’ve got excellent incentives and motivation, and you’ll get it done as soon as it can humanly be done.”

I’ll have to think about it more, but I’m sure it’s an everything-in-moderation point of view.

For the past few months, it’s been *impossible* to find developers. Specifically: experienced, creative, energetic, open-source active LAMP developers. We’ve been trying since February, and were lucky to get the _one_ that we found.

Then today, I was discussing the employment situation and my current options with Neil, and he shared a fascinating theory: Google is sucking up all the good talent in NYC.

The evidence, he cites is: this revealing nugget .

So, it looks like they’re tripling their space, then tripling their staff! It was hard enough to find people a year ago, and now the competition for candidates has increased rediculously! Of course if Google offers a job, you say yes, but what do the rest of us do??

I’m betting all the job boards (Joel’s included) are making a killing these days! So many people need to fill out their teams, and can’t find the people to do it!

Remember a few years ago when all Yahoo! was good for was a painfully slow e-mail system and pretty decent searching? Their look was the same forever, their pages were crowded… new features? what new features?

Today I read the news that Yahoo! is re-launching it’s photos section… properly branded for Yahoo! (instead of Flickr). They will keep Flickr around – saying it’s for the “early adopters,” and that Yahoo! Photos is for the masses. This is a great move. Yahoo! has very strong branding, and they’re throwing that muscle behind innovative new products that really do what people want.

That sounds like the motto of their Valley neighbors, Google.

Google is the new kid on the block… more like that kid in High School that moved into the neighborhood and blew the curve in every class. They come in with great ideas and training and muscle their way into the front row, and take all the attention away from the former teachers’ pets. Then those pets have competition and get off their lazy bums and study hard.

Okay, the analogy is becoming a Joel-esque diatribe, but you get the point. Google is doing doubletime building and buying products that support their business model, which is making the rest of the class step up to meet the challenge. Microsoft is working hard on their online properties – because they *have* to – same with Yahoo! and Ask and so on and so on…

Would they have been so inspired had there been no Google? Does Google mind the competitors? I’m guessing no on both accounts.

I thoroughly enjoyed attending both the Zend and SDWest conferences this year. So much of what we do as developers is standing on the shoulders of giants – learning from their examples and mistakes. It shows how much of a community we are in the world. Arguably the most global and technologically connected of any community.

I’m glad I attended both conferences, because the combination of the two showed me clearly what is missing from both. SDWEST gave me the concepts and trends that are so important in software development, and Zend gave me specific examples of the best ideas about php, but neither covered the seemingly obvious overlap of “web software development.”

I’m talking best practices, trends in user interface technology, advantages of xhtml compliance, how to handle legal concerns, and so on. I could continue at length generating a list of topics I’d love to see on a conference schedule.

So the obvious next step would be… create a conference! Or even propose the idea to O’Reilly or CMP for inclusion in one of their conferences. But I’d say that’s jumping the gun a little.

This conference needs to stay small and cheap. One of the likely reasons this doesn’t exist is because the target audience doesn’t have the time or deep pockets to invest in a big conference. I’m talking small web dev shops, or small teams in larger organizations where the web is their passion and their bread and butter. It needs to be financially accessible (i.e. free), and convenient (read: local).

I’ve attended the New York Tech Meetup, and the NextNY events, and while they are making great strides in bringing the tech/new media community together, I don’t see how much the group is benefiting from the meetings.

Okay, that may not be fair. I’m sure that some valuable connections were made, and some great ideas were formed, but I’m really looking for something that can really give back to the whole community. I want peoples’ experiences to drive education of the community, so we can really move forward in technology and make the web a safer place for our kids. (I jest)

In what non-believers call a coincidence, Charlie O’Donnell of USV/NextNY announced that Google is happy to play host to NextNY’s next meeting. This would also be the inaugural non-recreational meeting of the group. A perfect opportunity to present the idea. I proposed to Charlie that we use this event to start a series of talks or roundtables aimed at the web community in New York. While he doesn’t think it would fit in with the next meeting, he suggested I start a wiki page on the site to gain some traction with the group. Now I need to get some ideas down for people to respond to!

After listening to Bob Martin’s keynote The Prime Directive I have been doing my best to identify situations where people are getting blocked, and do my best to fix that. I’ve also come to realize a number of situations where I’m getting blocked. In few instances, there are things I can do to fix it. The most frustrating of those are the ones where I know how to fix them, I’m certain I can, yet I’m not being allowed to make that call.

This actually has manifested itself in a lack of sleep and last night I actually had a very frustrating dream that really worked nicely allegorically. In one instance, I was leaving (what I believed to be) a movie theatre. I left a group of friends and went on my merry way home, and as I walked (in my geographical brain, it seemed to be on the east side in the 20’s), the street started to appear more like an alley. There were raw brick building walls with fire escapes and dumpsters. The walls gradually got narrower and narrower, and the street seemed to go up a few stairs every ten feet or so. Just ahead of me was an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a long time. I caught up with him just as we reached the dead end of this long street. The dead end was literally that – the walls had come in so narrow, and the street had come up so far, and the overhangs so low that the end of it all was a one foot by one foot square where it all ended. We shrugged and turned back, all the way to the start of the street.

The next thing I can remember is being picked up at a train station by this old friend’s mother. It was suddonly like we were coming back from a long trip, and she was dropping people off, only, she didn’t feel like bringing me to my house. I ended up at theirs, and stuck. My house was too far to walk to with all my stuff, and there really wasn’t anyone I could call for a ride. I was pleading with her, and she was being unreasonable without explanation. Downright nasty too. Then I just changed. I stopped acting like the friend-of-her-son, and became an adult who was being treated unfairly. I told her, in no uncertain terms, where to stick it, and that she was driving me, and that was that. I woke up very soon thereafter feeling much better.

There is a pile of “very important” tasks that aren’t being tended to well enough ( in my estimation ), and with the current supervisor of all things tech going somewhere else, and the new CTO not arriving for three weeks – a lot of mold can grow.

I can relate this down to another situation I find myself in. There’s someone I tend to shut down when they step over that imaginary line. I’m certain it frustrates them – I see the result. I tell myself that my skepticism and reluctance to give lattitude are a result of poor justifications on their part, as well as demonstrated lack of thinking things through. I’m not doing enough to remedy those fundamental problems, no. But how would I try?