Topic: Software Development
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon speeding down the motorway, filled with magnetic tapes full of data. Those tapes hold a large amount of data, but the station wagon is hardly traveling at the speed of light; and adding more station wagons isn't going to make them go any faster. This quick talk by Philip Tellis describes how to measure latency and what to do about it.
Consumer mapping on the web and traditional back-office geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming less distinct. Both are more accessible, standards-based, and flexible. Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, speaks about the creation of a publicly accessible GIS mapping system, ArcGIS.com, a web platform that works with maps from various authoritative sources and provides the public with useful tools to add and use their own crowdsourced, volunteered geographic information (VGI).
The market is beginning to fight being "hijaaked" by proprietary SDKs to develop mobile content and experiences. Blackberry maker, Jim Balsillie, shares his predictions for the rapidly-changing mobile market. Balsillie thinks the days of proprietary SDKs are as doomed as proprietary DRMs for music. He calls on the audience to reject the "appification" of the web, saying, "you shouldn't need a YouTube App to go to YouTube on a mobile device." Balsillie also answers questions about Blackberry security and credentialing for point-of-sale.
Every user experience embodies its creators' experience. All of its creators, not just the single person with the title "user experience designer." Justin Maxwell has come to believe that conflict in an organization will be apparent in its products. A team that gets along and has fun will create fun products. Justin gives a clear definition of user experience and concludes, "User experience is multi-dimensional, is evolving, and cannot be designed."
Currently popular JavaScript benchmarking programs may report misleading results, potentially wasting developers' time. Ben Zorn, a research engineer from Microsoft, shows case-by-case examples of misleading results revealed by his work with co-authors Ben Livshits and Paruj Ratanaworabhan. Ben Zorn compares performance of real web sites to the artificial sites employed by optimization tools SunSpider and V8. He also shows how to avoid the pitfalls of solving "problems" that are merely artifacts of skewed benchmarks.
Dr. Moria Gunn looks to the future of computers and biotechnology, with Anaris President and CEO, Joan Lau.
How does a 3rd party Web application developer make the app run fast on the host site? And how can it do so without breaking other things on the site? How can an app load lots of features and functionality, while avoiding blocking the rest of the page from loading and giving the user a negative perception? Enter on stage the Meebo bar, now on over 6,000 websites, as a way to make 3rd party apps and local content live peaceably together.
Google has crawled over 3 billion lines of computer code, revealing some surprising trends. "The way people code is very interesting," says Chris DiBona, Google's open source programs manager. He shares insights from the "Google Code" project, and closes by identifying "the most important coder in the world, who will be shaping computer science for decades to come."
Is the cloud infrastructure becoming the "new hardware?" What are the issues around points of control, and who will end up being the custodian of our information? What does the "global operating system infrastructure" look like? Hear informed perspectives on these timely questions in this candid exchange of ideas among leaders from VMWare, Inc., salesforce.com, and Amazon Web Services.
If you remember programming in C, you'll remember that it felt like music, or wine, or philosophy. Programming languages back then were laconic; they said all in just a few words. Today's mainstream programming languages, in contrast, are heavy, intricate and verbose. How did we get here and what comes next? Rob Pike, the co-creator of the Go programming language and a Distinguished Engineer at Google, thinks the solution is a language that gives us the best from both worlds.
