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A ReadWriteWeb Guide South by Southwest Interactive is a favorite conference for many a geeky programmer, and its no wonder why. The talent, learning opportunities and free booze run deep and wide at this show. We've compiled a list of ten must-see, must-do panels, parties and events - and don't worry, we won't be sending you to three identical core conversations on JavaScript. From Google's Hackathon to Facebook's Developer Garage and beyond, you'll get to learn from (and drink with) some of the greatest minds behind the greatest companies of the Web. Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn't your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon! Revenge Of Kick-Ass Mash-Ups with Punk Rock APIs "Last time we wrote an API layer for a dozen different sites and services, using nothing but free online tools and client-side JavaScript. This time we'll crack into client-side OAuth. This time actual working code WILL BE WRITTEN BY YOU. This time ... it's personal." With Kent Brewster of Netflix. Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps "Every startup origin story is about a couple of developers who abscond to a garage and end up building the Next Big Thing. But money and fame don't need to be your end goal. You can significantly improve your life--and impact others' lives--by coding for pleasure in your spare time." With Gina Trapani, Adam Pash of Lifehacker and Matt Haughey of MetaFilter. Mozilla SXSW Happy Hour "Join us for happy hour drinks and appetizers at Cedar Door and learn what we are working on at Mozilla. Party is limited to the first 250 guests who arrive - please RSVP on Facebook: http://bit.ly/mozsxswparty !" Web Framework Battle Royale "Which web framework will rule them all? As an audience member you pick the winner! We will present an introduction to a variety of web frameworks including Rails, Django, Catalyst, and Sinatra. You can vote for the best web framework in categories such as URL handling, database integration, forms, HTML templating, documentation, testing and deployment." With Yehuda Katz of Engine Yard, Leah Culver of Six Apart, Elizabeth Leddy of Janus Health, Blake Mizerany of Heroku, Avi Bryant of Dabble DB and Dustin Whittle of Yahoo. The Hive Awards "The Hive Awards honor the Unsung Heroes of the Internet. The people who do the heavy lifting but rarely get any credit. Drinks, hors d'oeuvres, free admission." Sponsored by KickApps. Facebook Developer Garage Austin - SXSW Edition "Join the Facebook team and local developers for a deep dive into the latest and most exciting ways developers are building with Facebook technologies. Come to learn, stay to make friends! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=331218348435 " Beyond LAMP: Scaling Websites Past MySQL "Most startups begin with a basic LAMP stack (on PHP or Python) and then add database replication and memcache as they grow. But then what? There's a big gap between these out-of-the-box solutions and what it takes to run something bigger." With Serkan Piantino of Facebook, Alan Schaaf of Imgur, Kevin Weil of Twitter, Christopher Slowe of Reddit and Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch. Objective C Crash Course for Web Developers "Build your first iPhone app in 60 minutes flat. Along the way, you'll tour Apple's developer tools and learn the basics of the Cocoa Touch framework. Discover how to use your PHP and JavaScript experience for an informed approach to coding iPhone apps. Apply familiar JavaScript design patterns, for example, to handle interface programming in Objective-C." With Joris Verbogt of Mangrove. If Objective-C isn't your bag, why not try Hold the Cocoa: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and learn how to build iPhone apps "without ever touching Objective-C." Wow, That's Cool... Fun With HTML5 Video "Using the video tag in HTML5, developers can do all sorts of things that are hard or impossible with plugins. In this presentation, Mozilla will show the best and most interesting hacks entered into OVA's Open Video Contest - because when the webmonkeys unleash their creativity, things get interesting." With Michael Dale of Kaltura Wikimedia and Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla. Google Hackathon "The Google Hackathon hosted by Google will provide a hands-on workshop throughout the day where attendees will be able to build apps using a variety of Google technologies including App Engine, HTML5, Android, Chrome, and Maps/Geo technologies. Although the hackathon will run all day long (from 9:30-7:00pm), we'll be providing short 20 minute "deep dive" presentations on specific topics covered in the hands-on exercises. This panel is sponsored by Google." Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for hackers of all stripes. If you've got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss
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SXSW 2010 for Hackers
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Editor's note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products. It's 2010 - disruption is everywhere. The pace of technology is quicker and faster than ever before. News of iTablets for touch-screen magazines alerts us that we're living in a multi-channel, multi-platform, multi-device-kinda world. So how do we keep up with innovation while being mindful of resources and cost-savings? Sponsor Any healthy business strategy in 2010 should include an API platform component in it. Establishing a platform strategy is an excellent corporate tactic to achieve faster time-to-market (TTM) results. APIs do this all while cutting unnecessary investments in time, resources and finances. The benefits of APIs are not only the revenue earned, but savings realized in development and operational costs. Did you recently launch an API? Congratulations! You have just inherited a brand new customer base: developers. Treat your developers with the courtesy you would extend to any customer of your business. Hear their suggestions, incorporate their feedback and let them know you are listening. Ignore your new set of customers and their needs, and they'll be sure to return the favor. Focusing on customers requires an exercise in understanding, segmenting and mapping to help you achieve broader corporate goals. Regardless of the stage of your API platform (planning, building, sustaining) this post will provide a useful look into how to plan for successful developers on your platform. Define Success, Stay Focused Value can't just be perceived, it has to be actual. The API platform cannot stand alone; rather it needs to be tightly integrated with business objectives in mind. A good top down approach for planning your API starts by defining what success is for the company. Supporting corporate markers for success will get you the executive buy-in you need to boost your API efforts. Mapping your success through goal setting and measurement processes keeps you cognizant of both short and long-term opportunities. Next, align your platform strategy with your business strategy - identify company-wide goals to measure against. For example: double revenue for the company in five years increase user / consumer engagement by 12% reduce partner implementation costs by 30% increase the number of new Tier 1 partners by 10% increase the number of internal projects delivered by 20% It's important that the API platform be accountable to the business strategy, by generating revenue and driving partnerships, within a sustainable platform growth model. How else will you know when you've been successful? Developer Segmentation Strategy You know the business goals and have analyzed the success markers. But now you need to evaluate the best approaches to achieve developer success within your API universe. Start with a classic business customer segmentation study to identify and prioritize your developer audiences. This will help you formulate a clear and effective value message to encourage more developers to consume your API. To build your segmentation study, answer this series of strategic questions: Do you know who your developers are? Do you know what programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Python) and platforms (mobile, widget, browser) your developers are using? Do you know what influences or motivates your developer to build on your API? (Money, fame, fortune?) Do you know the proper channels to reach your developers? (Where do they live, work and play?) Do you know who amongst your developers are the most profitable partners? Consider both qualitative and quantitative information to inform the decisions above. Once you've established developer segments, it becomes easier to tie opportunities back to the corporate business goals. And it's imperative to consider the available resources (time, workforce, finances) to create realistic platform goals. Focus, focus, focus. Go after your priority segments first, given the reality of limited resources. This is an important exercise in platform planning that adds communications efficiency, and better overall potential revenue performance of your API platform. Community Feedback If you've already launched an API platform and have built up a small (or large) developer network, then be sure to garner feedback directly and indirectly from them. Surveys, polls, discussion boards, comments, tweets and social buzz tell you how the community feels about your API, brand and efforts. So pay close attention, and analyze the numbers too. Look into your developer portal dashboards (or reports) to get aggregate information on popular calls, methods, search terms, coding languages and other items that relate to the health and curiosity of your API network. In addition to the segmentation questions mentioned above, consider your top developer targets, and the resources you need to provide to help them achieve success. It can be something as simple as language considerations. Build in Success Metrics As mentioned earlier, the API platform needs to play a role in the revenue growth of the company. Oftentimes, champions of API platforms struggle with proving the ROI of a program since it's a relatively new channel that has many avenues of use. The simplest and most powerful way to demonstrate the impact is to assess what can be measured, such as: revenue attributable to API CTR to pages with ad revenue via API affiliate CTR on content using API number of user of mobile apps built using API And since a robust, active and engaged API network leads to more creative developments, take note of metrics that substantiate a healthy community, such as: number of developers number of live applications downloads of your SDKs and toolkits This combination of strategic thought-starters for platform planning and developer segmentation is hopefully a guide for you to get the most out of your API platform. So remember, treat your developers like customers . That's the best rule of thumb when it comes to creating a robust developer community around your API program. Discuss
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Sponsor Post: Developer Community 101: Treat Your Developers Like Customers
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TheSixtyOne Seeks to Solve the Problem In an interesting move against those who would manipulate traffic on the social web, music site TheSixtyOne is looking for a programmer who can crack the codes of voting rings. On sites such as Digg, Reddit and even TheSixtyOne itself, spammers can rig a supposedly democratic system that allows good content to rise to prominence. They do this by having networks of bots that automatically vote for any content they submit. TheSixtyOne hopes that a cleverly written code submission will solve the problem of gamed virality or popularity mechanisms - and they're looking to hire the hacker who can do it. Sponsor They've added the following problem to their Jobs section for candidates who "want to make [their] application stand out." A social news website called 'Reddigg' has hired you as a consultant to help them with a potentially serious problem. Reddiggers submit news articles in hopes that their submission will make it to the front page -- an article has a chance of getting posted once it receives enough upvotes. Reddigg suspects spammers have found a way to manipulate the system by commanding fake users to regularly vote for their own articles, hence forming 'voting rings'. You've been hired to identify suspected voting rings based on recent user data. Your task may not be as straightforward as it seems however. The caveat is that the spammers may have fashioned their sock puppets to act like real users. To create some misdirection, fake users may sometimes withdraw their vote on targeted articles or even vote on articles that they have no association with. Kevin Huffman and Alexis Rose, the creators of Reddigg, request that you write a program in Python or C to identify the top five suspected unique voting rings consisting of at least five users for each ring. In the past, musician friends have told us that they suspect a certain amount of system-rigging goes on at TheSixtyOne. It's nice to see that a social media site is trying to put a stop to this kind of behavior instead of allowing its ecosystem to grow in an unhealthy way that serves no one - not end users and not genuinely interesting content creators. For more information on TheSixtyOne, check out our previous coverage - its recent redesign makes it one of our favorite apps of the year. Discuss
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This Game Is Fixed! Democratized Content v. Voting Rings
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In the past, we've talked a bit about issues of gender and technology , but today, this blog post brought another important aspect of tech and discrimination to our attention. We polled some of our friends on Google Buzz and asked whether ageism is something they've seen at work or that has effected their lives. And the responses were interesting - although some say they try to be as even-handed as possible, others said that age discrimination exists at both ends of the spectrum, especially when it comes to landing a job. Let us know your experiences and opinions in the comments. Sponsor What Experts Say A 2001 article from CIO started a conversation about ageism in IT. The response was dramatic. "Within days of being asked 'Do CIOs Discriminate Against Older Workers?' about 200 readers had posted answers; a majority of them gave a resounding yes... workers age 55 and older make up only 6.8 percent of the IT workforce." A couple years later, a 2003 study from the International Journal of Selection and Assessment explored how older and middle-aged programmers fared in the tech workforce. Results showed "that age was negatively associated with both annual salary and job benefits levels." But in 2009, another study showed what could have been seen as a turning tide. "The study, ' The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom ,' found that... the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom - not in spite of an aging population but because of it... The average age of U.S.-born technology founders when they started their companies was 39." What People on the Ground Say Perhaps the graying set are doing well as entrepreneurs, but what about when they apply to be programmers, information architects, web designers or other traditionally "young" jobs? In a lively conversation on our Buzz account , Aaron Hayes told us that ageism is alive and well, saying, "I turned 40 this year, and even though I can write Python circles around some... [and] have run several of my own small businesses - somehow, because the metabolic process of my cells has been occurring for several solar rotations beyond a subset of unspoken rules, I can be dismissed by some as a viable candidate for a startup. "And this apparently because people that have experience clearly can't have youthful enthusiasm, or passion." Even though, as Ruggero Domenichini said in the same thread, older employees might have "less ego, nothing to prove, been through failure [and] lived more." And person after person said that they had either hired older programmers and been totally pleased with their fit and performance or - in one case - not hired someone because of age and regretted it ever since. What Do You Say? We're interested to know what your experience has been, either as a younger startup exec faced with hiring decisions or as an older programmer working in IT. On a personal level, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the older techies in my life - especially as I begin to earn a few gray hairs of my own. My old-as-dirt dad is a fabulous network engineer, and a lot of the best developers and entrepreneurs I know have lived long enough to have a mature, realistic and stable view of their abilities, the ecosystem and their colleagues. And in an amendment of the famous "Never trust anyone over 30" quotation, I'd have to say I'd gladly take the word of a 50-year-old who knew his stuff over a 25-year-old entrepreneur starting his first company. And the hypothetical 25-year-old would do well to take his older colleague's advice seriously, as well. As always, let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss
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Open Thread: Old Fogeys v. Young Whippersnappers, Ageism in Tech
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