Today was the first day of the annual Philly Emerging Tech conference. Here’s a quick rundown:

I left about an hour and a half early to allow plenty of time for Philly traffic but despite my GPS’s estimate of a 40 minute commute, I wound up arriving 15 minutes late. The bad weather and a wrong turn into Camden didn’t help anything either.

Today’s keynote speaker was Michael Tiermann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat and President of the Open Source Initiative. To give you an idea of his vision, here are a few quotes from his presentation:

“Lots of innovation results in an increase in productivity”

“Now that we can do anything, what should we do?”, quoting Bruce Mau

“How can we be better?” quoting JP Sloan

“Leave your system open to innovation”

Did you know… Somebody did a study of contributions to Apache and calculated that 1 developer did about 20% of the work, 5 did about 50%, 15 about 80%, and an amazing 388 people to do all 100%? Also, proprietary software averages 20-30 defects/1000 lines of code. Open source: less than 1. The linux kernel is about 5M lines of code. An automated software scan came up with 985 errors and with the help of the community, they were all fixed within six months. Now compare that to Vista, which is estimated to be about 50M lines of code, which does not have an extensive community to help fix what must be at least a few hundred thousand lines of defective code.

He said something else that I thought was good. I forgot the context, but it was something like “The cost to the developer is less than the value to the customer.”

When he finished I went to an introductory presentation about iPhone software development by Bill Dudney. I never really appreciated how easy it is to create an application’s interface. I thought you had to program the behavior of the tables, the sliding buttons, etc. Turns out most are just customizable controls. He walked a packed room through the creation of a simple app in under 40 minutes. He was very well spoken and definitely knew his stuff.

I bounced around a bit during the next hour. I started off in a presentation about Android development then went to Exhibitionism in Software Development and finally wound up in a talk being given on the importance of accessibility in web development.

After that was lunch. I thought we would have to leave to go get lunch, so when I came out of the accessibility talk and a buffet was already set up, it was a pleasant surprise.

I ate with a few other people from the Philly on Rails meetups–Chris, Jon, Angel, and Randy. Colin, Alex, Aaron, JP, and a few others were around too. Also met Chris, the CTO of a Philly startup called Vuzit that has created a novel Ajax-based document viewer.

After lunch was a talk called Innovation in Ruby given by Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack of Rails Envy fame. Their presentation was excellent both in terms of content as well as how they spoke and interacted with each other. For some reason I kept thinking “Batman and Robin” the whole time. Anyway, a lot of it was over my head, but I left with a much greater appreciation for the brilliant work being done in the Ruby and the Rails communities. I also briefly met Ezra Zygmuntowicz, who apparently founded Engine Yard and created merb. Nice guy.

Next was John Resig of jQuery glory. Before the talk I asked the guys why use jQuery over Prototype. I don’t remember what Randy said, but it was something poetic about how code just flows from his hands or something to that effect. John’s talk was good, despite the Public Address problems that resulted in us hearing the presentation being given in another room and eventually a full blown rock song. Next project is going to be with jQuery. I’m convinced that it kicks ass.

Last but not least was Mike Culver from Amazon Web Services who spoke about and demoed Mechanical Turk. I thought his presentation was the most interesting one all day. What an amazing technology.

Tomorrow: Day 2, where I continue to learn more about just how much I don’t know. :)

Really interesting article in the Economist:

The triumph of entrepreneurship is driven by profound technological change. A trio of inventions—the personal computer, the mobile phone and the internet—is democratising entrepreneurship at a cracking pace. Today even cash-strapped innovators can reach markets that were once the prerogative of giant organisations.

…

Another reason for entrepreneurship becoming mainstream is that the social contract between big companies and their employees has been broken. Under managed capitalism, big companies offered long-term security in return for unflinching loyalty. But from the 1980s onwards, first in America and then in other advanced economies, big companies began slimming their workforces. This made a huge difference to people’s experience at the workplace. In the 1960s workers had had an average of four different employers by the time they reached 65. Today they have had eight by the time they are 30. People’s attitudes to security and risk also changed. If a job in a big organisation can so easily disappear, it seems less attractive. Better to create your own.

I love audiobooks.

I got into them a little over a year ago after my former roommate convinced me I should give them a try. With work, programming, and now a marriage its hard to find extra time to read. I’m in the car for about 80 minutes a day, making audiobooks an easy and convenient way to get exposed to books I othewise would never have read.

Here’s a list of the books I’ve listened to in order since February 08, which I think is pretty representative of my interests:

The Assault on Reason

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

The Daily Show with John Stewart Presents America (The Audiobook)

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Abridged)

The World is Flat

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Unabridged)

The Kite Runner

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the New Economy

A Walk in the Woods

I’m a Stranger Here Myself

The Gods of Mars

eBoys

You Need to Be a Little Crazy

The Innovators Dilemma

Investing for Dummies

The Intelligent Investor

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maitenance

Fooled by Randomness

The Virtue of Selfishness

Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal

Outliers

Blink

The Tipping Point

The Count of Monte Cristo

I am America (And So Can You)

A few things: I did not finish The Hacker Ethic (its terrible), the investing books, or Ayn Rand’s books. Those are too hard to follow at 6am and I found myself constantly zoning out. I’d like to sit down with a highlighter and a pen one day and figure out what’s going on in those books.

How God Poisons Everything is a bitter intellectual rant. The End of Faith is a much better book.

I waited about six months after finishing the Kite Runner to attempt fiction again. If you’ve read the Kite Runner you’ll understand why.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was fascinating, but I don’t think I understood most of it.

I listened to the abridged version of A Short History of Nearly Everything and liked it so much that I bought the unabridged version… and listened to it twice. After reading them I’d like to become a middle school science teacher one day down the line, maybe in thirty of forty years. I think that’d be a great job.

Bill Bryson’s books are among my favorites. He’ll make you laugh and teach you thing or two in the process. After reading A Walk in the Woods, I have a strange desire to hike the Appalachian Trail.

I also listened to eBoys and The World is Flat twice, but mostly because I was too lazy to download new books at the time.

I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s books a lot too, especially Outliers.

You’d think I would have learned a lot after listening to these, but I fear that I’ve only retained a small fraction of the information presented in the books. On the way to work its usually early so I’m tired. On the way home I’m also tired and usually reflecting on the day’s events or whatever I have planned for the evening so I’m not all there then either.

I’ve gotten much better at detecting when I’m zoning out. If I notice myself doing it more than two or three times I just switch to music.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for something new. While searching for audiobook recommendations on HackerNews, I came across VentureVoice, a large collection of interviews with internet entrepreneurs. It includes interviews with Evan Williams, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Fried, Derek Sivers and a whole host of other well known founders.

Also via that HN post, Stanford also has a series of entrepreneurial lectures that you can find here. They include topics like Ten Enduring Success Factors for High Technology Entrepreneurship, Balancing Life and Work, The Evolution of Yahoo!, The Art of Negotiation, and a whole bunch of other goodies.

These should keep me busy for a few months.

If you have any recommendations, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email.

Wolfram Alpha, an Artificial Intelligence engine that will be used to answer factual questions, is one of the most innovative and ambitious projects I’ve come across. It’s not coming out until May, but details are emerging about what will surely be a major player in the future of the web.

From Nova Spivak, who met with Stephen Wolfram to discuss the project:

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It’s the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world — a new leap in the intelligence of our collective “Global Brain.” And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way — it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

More information from Wolfram’s blog:

And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.

So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.

But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.

It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.

And finally, a HackerNews testimonial:

I had a chance to see this in action a while back. While I, and none of the people I saw this with, were not at all impressed by NKS, this project blew our minds. We watched as it pulled up and manipulated everything from Egyption fraction expansions to historic weather data to the human genome. If the author of this article is exaggerating, it’s not by a whole lot. While Wolfram may not be bringing about the revolution in science he hoped to, don’t forget that he and his crew made Mathematica, and are very capable of creating impressive software.