Unlike Yahoo, who capped participation in last year’s Hack Day at the comfortable carrying capacity of their campus, Google decided (since there’s no sleepover component) to take more folks and move to the San Jose Convention Center for GDD07. Social event for the evening is still back at the ‘Plex, wonder if they’ll match Beck?
Registration is very smooth, plenty of organized tables so no big waits–although that’s changing now as we get closer to 10–and lots of coffee, fruit and pastries for the breakfast-deprived; nice black t-shirt for everyone. I came with the Big Guy but lost him as we had to go to separate registration tables. Lots of people (1500 if everyone showed up) and many have their laptops out like me.
Big news came out of yesterday’s event Down Under, the release of Google Gears and under a sweet BSD open source license. Not surprisingly, the breakout session devoted to it is being held in the biggest room, same as the opening keynote. The impact on ‘little’ projects like Dojo Offline and Joyent Slingshot is unclear at this early point, though I expect Brad Neuberg’s baby will feel more than the Rails-specific effort from my hosting company.
(Update: I ran into Chris Messina at lunch and he said the DojoToolkit folks are here and assured him their stuff is compatible, the impact may not be that serious especially since the Offline package is a small part of their whole. In fact, Brad announced in his presentation that their own runtime is being replaced by Gears and then builds much useful horizontal functionality atop it.)
Jeff Huber, VP Engineering, lead the keynote and introduced three new products: Gears, MashupEditor and Mapplets. Gears is very neat and I’m waiting now for the breakout session to see more details. MashupEditor is a fairly high level tool that enables even non-developers to build interactive web apps, which are then hosted on Google’s own infrastructure so no need for the deployment and sysadmin skills that cause problems for, say, Rails developers. Mapplets is a combination of the existing Gadgets and Maps API products and ought to drive even deeper adoption of Google Maps on non-Google sites.
Sergei Brin gave a few minutes of welcome at the end but was a bit off. I’ve not seen him speak before but thought he would say something more meaningful and use fewer platitudes.
The Gears session was a bit disappointing, to be honest. The first section, maybe 15 minutes or so laying out the problem space and the abstract solution, was too high level and therefore not enough time was left for diving into technical details. There’s another session at 4:30 which I hope will have more of this kind of information.
Lunch was good; as one other attendee put it, the free food is a little taste of the Google lifestyle. A variety of tastes, buffet-style and with multiple tables of each set to minimize waiting in line. Among the desserts were a selection of mini-cheesecakes, two or three bites each, and very difficult to resist–so I didn’t and had two.
I attended the Ajax API sessions in the two post-lunch blocks, the first with Marc Lucovski and the latter with Marc, Dion of Ajaxian fame and several other API Googlers. Both gave me a lot of food for thought, on using things like map and calendar on the new JHTC site I’m building, and ways to improve some of my hobby sites to make them more attractive (in the sense of attracting additional visitors).
The snack break was very bad. They put out too much food and I had a brownie and a hot pretzel. Bad! Though I did run into Robert Scoble, who always attracts interesting people around him which in this case included Peter Norvig and Brad Templeton, and Scott McMullen, who I know from early JotSpot days. Of course, Scott wouldn’t tell me when the Google version of JotSpot is launching.
Robert is the featured guest for the July 10 JHTC meeting, so if you’ll be available and in the area plan on coming–it’s free!
Last session for me was Nuts and Bolts and Gears. Brad Neuberg, who looks nothing like what I expected, used half the time to explain how DojoOffline was adapting to and using this new project and was followed by an engineer from the Google Web Toolkit team to explain the same for his product (but since I don’t work on Java it didn’t mean as much for me). These guys provided a really good technical explanation on using Gears and how DojoToolkit builds substantially atop it.
I think people will quickly create PHP and Ruby on Rails wrappers for Gears as it’s clearly going to be important for web app builders who want to drive usage of their products even while disconnected from the web. Many people asked security related questions about Gears (and the Ajax APIs too, to be fair) but I think while one must always be cognizant of the threat models one should also accept that not all apps are suited to offline use. Google Reader: yes, online banking: probably not.
Overall a really good day, plenty of inspiration and education, and a very good job from the Google staff in prepping and execution. Good assortment of speakers and topics, facilities well set up, plenty of food and drink, few long lines for anything and more than enough t-shirts to go around. Though, poor me, I missed out on the SketchUp socks.
BillSaysThis 