Whispers from the Valley
Haha worst post title ever.. so very Wal-Mart romance novel-esque. I love it.
So I wanted to share the word on the streets here in San Francisco. In attending conferences or hacker parties, here's the stuff that keeps cropping up, filtered to my tastes.
The dotcom is coming back
I often ask cab drivers about the original dotcom boom in SF. They often respond with stories about rude cell phone users or how impossible it was to get dinner reservation/place to rent. Recently, though, a 50 year old cab driver said "They're back. Just head down to South of Market. You'll see them everywhere." I noticed it but I was surprised that it was so obvious that he'd notice. Perhaps its the optimist in me but I don't think this will be a bubble/bust. Investors are smarter this time around.
Jeff Atwood (codinghorror.com) asked "What will you do differently this time?" I plan to spend an entire post on that. I'm eight years older this time around and now I live in the middle of all the action. There's a lot I'll do differently this time.
Amazon S3
All the startups, including smugmug are using Amazon's Simple Storage Service. We at RealCajunRecipes.com will be using it too, as a very affordable Content Delivery Network. Some people say it's not a CDN; I say whatever, it's cool that our visitors on the East Coast and the South will get their RCR images delivered from a much closer location. For just $0.10/Gig up and $0.18/Gig down (starting in June), it's likely that I'll also start using S3 and JungleDisk as a backup server as well. Even though there are cheaper solutions, I don't need to backup off-site but once a month so it works well for me.
Twitter.com
"Twitter is to blogging what chat is to e-mail." I overheard that at SHDH but can't find the source. I use Twitter sporadically; I can't really find a value for me yet.
BarCamp
BarCamp (or "BahCamp" in Boston) is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp." One of them in San Francisco is being held at Microsoft's offices. Drool (One day, my pretty).
Windows Powershell
Windows admins and enthusiasts are raising the roof about Powershell. It was one of the most talked about technologies at the recent Longhorn Roadshow that I attended. FYI, my friend Lee Holmes, a member of the PowerShell Team in Redmond, asked readers of his blog if any PowerShell newbies are interested in being technical reviewers for his O'reilly book "PowerShell: The Definitive Guide." I know I am! I've been anxiously awaiting my copy since May of last year.
Virtualization
This is one of my favorites, I'm totally in awe of virtualization technology, especially the stuff I see VMware put out. Longhorn has virtualization built in (a native SSL VPN too omg!) but many believe it will be about 2010 before they are a real competitor to VMware.
I could probably go on a bit more but I have finals to study for (again). Wish me luck.. I'll need it this class. Stuped [sic] hardware.