Blog them all

Apparently the WWDC is not the only event that solds out before it even started… Har2009 is now sold out, no more tickets, plus de tickets, kaput!

What is HAR ? Probably the best Hacker oriented event that occurs only every 4 years. It usually holds at least 2,500 people or more, and I’ve personally attended HIP 97, HAL 2001, CCC 2003 (different organizers), WTH 2005, and will do so for HAR 2009.

See you there.

I had the chance to travel to California from last April to July. As any computer geek I had always dreamed about going to California, and mostly around Mountain View. Thanks for my friends, I had the chance to visit Google few times, Yahoo!, Six Apart, Google Android, Apple, some smaller private startups. I’ve got beers with the guys from GitHub (thanks Tom, it was nice meeting you), LightHouse, Twitter, LinkedIn, AfterShock (thanks James!). Orange Lab told me on Twitter I could call 1014 (A French phone number for customer support) to meet them (ahah). I’ve met many more people which I can’t list here, and I’ve also finally met Phil Jeudy (twitter).

I’ve attended the Rails Conf 2009 in Vegas, and the WWDC 09 in SF. The rails conference was very high level, Vegas had the cheapest hotels I could imagine for the room we got. On the other side the WWDC conferences were not as high level as I would imagine, but someone said 60% of the attendees never attended before. I would recommend going to both if it’s you work in those domains, meeting people in real is a big boost for your projects.

Something I did not have in mind, is the good general vibe you have in San Francisco. I had the chance to meet Shane Vitarana (blog), who published DrumKit on the Appstore (it’s featured in Apple ads, on Union Square on top of buildings, etc). He introduced me to many people, and we had a lot of fun together (I have to confess, I don’t go out much while I’m in Paris, but did almost every day in SF). Thanks Shane, you made my trip.

I’ve learned a lot being in San Francisco for that long, on iPhone projects as much as on Rails projects, and on web projects in general. If you work on ideas, make them happen in California. It won’t take longer than anywhere else, but the general impact might be much bigger for you. Raising funds is much easier too. I’ve met so many independent developers in San Francisco making lots of money (>$200K a year) without working much (but worked hard in the past, or had a good idea).

You have two kinds of people in San Francisco, the ones working 20 hours a day, or doing 2 hours commuting a day going from downtown to Mountain View and working for the big players. And you have the ones not working as much and enjoying life. I’d suggest going for the 2nd option if you plan to go to SF.

So would I go back to San Francisco ? Hell yeah ! But surprisingly I would go again not for work, but for the good vibe. Of course there are tons of IT companies there, and even the average level of software developers ain’t better than France (or other countries), you have way more people, way more companies. That operates like a magnet. At the end, you have way more projects happening there. San Francisco makes projects possible. My only concern is time does not run the same way in SF, and a one year stay would pass like a week in other cities.

See you soon San Francisco (my flickr California set).

I’m working on a Ruby on Rails plugin for managing iPhone 3.0 Apple Push Notification. Because this is under NDA I can’t say much about it here, but you’ll find a password protected git repository on the Apple Developer Forums, in this specific post. Patch and feedbacks welcome if you are an iPhone developer.

I also bought my tickets for WWDC 2009, and will be in California from April 30th to June 14th. I might also be at the Railsconf 2009 at Las Vegas but only on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I’d be interested to meet anyone in the iPhone/Rails community reading this blog.

Il y a les mauvais conférenciers, les bons conférenciers, et les excellents conférenciers. Dans les derniers j’inclus Laurence Lessig. Il fait comment pour synchroniser ses slides avec ses mots Laurence ? (pour les mauvais je filerai des liens quand je les aurai retrouvé, mais on en trouve beaucoup en France).