Google IO 2009: Tech Talks

I, like many 10-5 developers not working directly with ajaxified web 2.0 applications, was not able to go to the Google I/O conference. I don’t feel so bad not going since Google has just released video recordings of over 80+ technical presentations from Google I/0. Most of the technical presentations are pushing Google’s APIs such as Android, Google App Engine, GWT, and Open Social.

As an aid for myself, and maybe other GWT developers, I have organized the pertinent tech talks as follows…

The Myth of the Genius Programmer
A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We’ll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.

Even Faster Websites
Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and the creator of YSlow. In this talk, he presents some of the best practices from his next book, including optimizing CSS selectors, flushing the document early, and discovering why 15% of users don’t get compressed responses.

Bespin and the Open Web
The Bespin project from Mozilla Labs is an experiment in re-envisioning how we develop software. In its current guise as a sometimes-fast web-based text editor shrouded in a horribly incomplete code editing platform, its potential might not be readily apparent. In this talk, Ben and Dion (two of the folks behind Bespin) will discuss the goals of the project, how they got to where we are now, go into implementation details on what it takes to build a bleeding edge application for today’s browsers (and not the ones from 1997) and share some hopes and thoughts on the future.

Big Modular Java with Guice
Learn how Google uses the fast, lightweight Guice framework to power some of the largest and most complex applications in the world. Supporting scores of developers, and steep testing and scaling requirements for the web, Guice proves that there is still ample room for a simple, type-safe and dynamic programming model in Java. This session will serve as a simple introduction to Guice, its ecosystem and how we use it at Google.

Do You Believe in the Users?
Too many programmers have forgotten about the lost art of customer service. All software has users, though most developers have forgotten how to respect them, trust them, or “sell” their software to them in an exciting (but honest!) manner. This talk will focus on anecdotes and strategies for keeping software design uncomplicated, making software fast, and putting usability above programming convenience. We’ll also focus on the importance of keeping a healthy illusion of simplicity, while allowing abstractions to deliberately leak for power-users.