Google I/O
http://code.google.com/events/io/
28, 29 May 2008
Moscone Center, San Francisco

This is the second annual Google Developers' Conference. It is here that Google teaches us how to use all of their technology to create great websites. I attended last year, when it was only one day and held in San Jose. I was happy to find a number of current and former Foothill students in attendance.

Keynote:
Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google
I was surprised to find that the name of the conference "I/O" stands for "INNOVATE/OPEN SOURCE". Google said that their motivation for giving away most of their software development technology is to advance the use of the web in general. The more cool apps that are on the web, the more people will use the web, and the more $$ that Google will make.

Keynote:
Marissa Mayer, VP of Search and User Experience at Google
She said that Google was started and has succeeded by having a "healthy disrespect for the impossible." She sees the imagination as a muscle that has to be exercised. Most of the products they were giving away at this conference were developed during the 20% of their time that each Google engineer gets to spend on their own projects.

Marissa also mentioned something I heard at Microsoft regarding user testing, that is A/B testing, where they introduce a new feature to only a portion of their users. Then they study how those users experience it before they release it to all users.

"State of Ajax":
UI = Visual design + Interaction design
Dijit is something I had never heard of. they said that it stood for:
dojo, Jquery, prototype, scriptaculous, GWT used together
Other new terms for me:
Aptana cloud
Greasemonkey (not new, but I need to work with this)
Fluid

"Spice up your apps":
More stuff to study~
map.enableGoogleBar()
Ajax libraries API (load libraries direct from Google servers)

"Can we get there from here?":
Described the different web development technologies as being on a spectrum
ubiquity vs, capability
markup vs. code

"Working with Google app engine models":
lookup up "antipatterns" on wikipedia
@decorator
"Design Patterns":
getfirebug.com
The speaker comparees the language javascript to a ninja,
and he compares the language java to a tank.
he also mentioned function closures as being important.