Last week, I had the pleasure and good fortune of attending the Business of Software conference in San Jose, California.
The lineup of speakers was truly impressive – many well-known figures from the software and blogging worlds.
Here’s a quick run-down of the speakers, and my impression of their talks. For a more detailed set of notes, check out the Business of Software blog
- First up was Guy Kawasaki Guy is a very well-known software guy and blogger, having formerly worked at Apple. His most recent venture is the start-up Truemors. His talk was called The Art of Innovation, and was excellent. However, I had previously seen a video of Guy giving this talk at another conference, and his presentation at the Business of Software was pretty much identical. In many ways, it was more like a performance than a presentation. Nevertheless, well worth seeing live, so to speak.
- Next was Tim Lister, he of Peopleware fame. Tim’s talk was about a set of project management patterns that he has observed from many years of practice. An interesting, but not earth shattering talk.
- Bill Buxton was next on the agenda. The theme of his talk was how the software development process is broken (what’s new there), and that what’s missing is a preproduction stage, along the lines of that in the movie industry. Buxton’s idea is that all stakeholders should be represented in the design stage of a project, where ideas are sketched out before a line of code is written. I wasn’t aware of Buxton before the conference, but was very impressed with the talk, and the ideas behind it. I bought Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences before I left, and am working my way through it now.
- The fourth speaker was Erik Sink. Sink runs a small software company that develops source code management software. The theme of his talk was Marketing for Geeks, and how geeks (or software professionals) can manage the process of software marketing as well as any marketing professionals. The one downside of this talk was that Sink develops software for other software people – not for normal people. This, I have no doubt, makes it much easier to market his wares, as he’s often preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, an interesting talk with plenty of good ideas.
- After lunch was a Software Idol slot, where four speakers gave short (15 minute) talks, and the audience had to vote for a winner. The winner (I suspect by a wide margin) was Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing. Excellent talk by an excellent speaker.
- At the 3pm coffee break, the conference organisers had arranged a breakout session. This involved a number of industry luminaries moderating topics of relevance to the conference. Usually these things are pretty lame affairs, and this one was no different, I’m afraid. I can’t say that I got very much out of this session. Thankfully, it didn’t go on too long.
- The next presenter was Alberto Savoia of Agitar Software. Alberto’s talk was about software quality metrics, and how there is no generally accepted metric for quality in the software industry. He then presented his proposed metric called Change Risk Analysis and Predictions, aka CRAP. As you can tell from the name, the talk and the material were very light-hearted, albeit with a serious intent. Savoia was not somebody I was aware of before the conference, but I found the topic and the presentation wonderful – probably the best of the conference.
- The last talk of day one was by Joel Spolsky, author of the very well known blog Joel on Software. Joel’s talk was about the process that he uses to hire and retain people in his company Fog Creek Software. While the talk was interesting, and well delivered, it was largely a re-presentation of much of the material he has already blogged about. Nevertheless, well worth seeing such a well known figure in action. As an aside, Spolsky is in Dublin this week. I recommend going along to one of the events, if you can make it.