Shaun R. Haber

I had the chance to attend O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference this year in my hometown San Diego. I went in Ethan Kaplan’s stead as he was unable to go. I’d like to thank Cory Doctorow for helping in registering me on such short notice.

This was the largest conference I’ve been to. OSCMSS last week was small and relaxed, despite being in the corporate realm of Yahoo!. While it focused heavily on the geeky technical stuff (code!), Etech seemed more focused on the business end of things (e.g. lots of suits).

It was a bit intimidating at first to mingle with the crowd, but I slowly got over it. I ended up meeting some interesting people and running into familiar faces.

Some notes:

• Using the word “magic” seemed to be a running theme for describing a non-technical person’s viewpoint of ubiquitous computing. This was apparent in many sessions, including Adam Greenfield’s talk in which he dissected common folklore tales and re-staged them with technical implementations (e.g. reciting “open sesame” to open a secret door relies on auditory sensors, voice detection, magnets, etc.). I regret missing Danah Boyd’s talk entitled “Incantations for Muggles”.
• Cory is an amazing public speaker, and his co-talk with Peter Biddle on the plusses and minuses of trusted computing was probably the most captivating session of the conference.
• I missed Pasha’s talk on Yahoo! Pipes last week at OSCMSS (it coincided with Dries’ talk). Luckily I got to see it this week. Pipes may be a useful tool for our Drupal project.
• I’m glad I caught Michael Buffington’s (of stikkit fame) talk today called “Your Web App as a Text Adventure”. He showed how you can develop more meaningful API’s for your web app if it were implemented as a classic text-based adventure game. He gave his talk as if he were playing in a text adventure himself, ending each slide with the options to “go north, south, etc.” and of course following through. This one was fun!
• I ran into an old acquaintance who managed to hack is way into the conference. I won’t divulge who he is (hint: lock-picking master) or how he got in (some luck and determination), but I personally think it’s awesome. I additionally ran into some cool peeps from UCSD, including a visual art teacher Ethan had worked with.
• I joined some people from Flickr for lunch today (Cheese Shop in Gaslamp), including Kellan, who gave a talk at OSCMSS last week on Flickr’s API (which I had unfortunately passed on in favor of the Drupal XML-Mashup talk instead). Kellan and I had a serendipitous moment earlier in the week. We had been sitting next to each other on the flight down from San Francisco Monday night, not realizing it until about halfway through. Additionally, he is the author of MagpieRSS, which we just used in our latest site launch: http://static-x.com/. It’s a small (tech) world, it is.

Overall, the conference was fun, but at times intimidating. I’m more comfortable and interested in talking about technology on the lower-level. That is, the actual code itself. Etech didn’t do that for me. OSCMSS did. Needless to say, Etech was a worthwhile time investment. I met some great people and kept my horizons broadened to appreciate some of the more abstract aspects of emerging technology (e.g. privacy concerns, inherent social issues vs. technology issues)

On a side note: I had a hard time coming up with suggestions for lunch today. Luckily I remembered the Cheese Shop. I don’t know much about restaurants in Gaslamp since I hardly eat downtown (I’ve always equated it with the Nightlife scene). Too bad we weren’t closer to Hillcrest since I know many good restaurants there.