I took off from Seattle this morning somewhere around 6:40, surprisingly alert but mentally void. The flight was mostly uneventful, and I have to give Alaska credit, this is the first flight that left on time and arrived early. Coming into wonderful sunshine at San Jose International was a welcome respite from Seattle, especially after the winter we had.
Given the time of the flight, I arrived a little late for the opening keynotes for Tuesday, but I walked in about 15 minutes into Guy Kawasaki's talk on "The Art of Innovation". Guy used to be an Apple Evangelist, and currently works as a venture capitalist and runs garage.com. Now, I've been an Apple fan since the late 80's, as a little kid reading Mac magazines and studying the executive team and public players at Apple during the rise of the Macintosh. When I was 11 years old, I read a book of his, The Macintosh Way. Instead of being a book about the Macintosh specifically, as I was expecting at that age, it was really a book about the good and bad, the right and wrong of marketing. In a lot of ways, it taught me on the fine art of evangelism, targeted specifically at the Macintosh, but really managed to extend to most of the products and services I truly believed in. It made me a great retail salesperson in my late teens, and helps me extol the virtues of the products I use to friends and family.
I got off track.
Anyway, Guy spoke about innovation, and the art of creating great things and getting them out into the world in today's marketplace. He spoke about how people forget that you want to be "high and to the right", like our president. It's obvious, but seems to be lost on many entrepreneurs. Essentially, you want to be in the upper right of two axis: a product or service that provides great value to the end user, and doesn't have a lot (or any!) competition in the market. He drove home that you shouldn't let bozos bring you down, since they don't know anything, and to get your product out the door -- it doesn't have to be perfect right away, but get it perfect as soon as you can, as those eyes are going to be on your product.
This was probably the best thing of the day. As this is my first conference, I think I was expecting something far different than what I encountered. The sessions I went to, which sounded like concepts I really wanted to learn about, were things that I was already aware of or had experience in. I don't think I know a ton about MySQL, though I've developed against and administered it for about seven years now. These sessions erred on the side of the high-level talks, so I spent most of them working instead of being really involved in it.
Another thing I noticed is how heavy the PHP influence is at this conference. Most of the people here are beginner-type PHP developers, and most of the products and services are tuned to the PHP developer. Ruby on Rails was represented pretty heavily here, as ActiveRecord is targetted at MySQL. It really makes me want to think about doing a session or two on Web 2.0 and Catalyst integration, even if I'm not the biggest MySQL fan.
I am going to go pass out now.
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