I am totally geeked to be here at Google IO. My main interest is in the Google Application Engine followed by the OpenID and OpenAuth stuff.
The coolest announcement is that AppEngine is now wide open for business – anyone can get an account.
It is amazing how open things are – it is so open that things seem unfinished at times – it is like we just showed up inside of a companies’ R/D lab and are a fly on the wall. I am sure there are many things that Google has in the works that we are not hearing about – but those things they are telling us about are their “trunk” of ideas. We are supposed to dive in and be part of it and evolve it. (whatever it is). It is OK that thinks feels like version 0.9 sometimes – hey some of my favourite software never got past version 0.9!
The people here are surprisingly serious – this is not a geek fest.
App Engine is awsome – it will cost money but a base level account will remain free – basically they are giving everyone a simple dr-chuck.com site – a place to experiment and develop their software and content. Think of this as an ultimate personal portfolio where you can make your own software to augment your portfolio.
The AppEngine is based on Google’s BigTable – a really fast hash/array/shard data store – it is an extremely fast object store – not a relational database.
Probably the coolest thing about App Engine and the talks that I went to is that it is all bout speed and scalability. They want you to write applications that use a small amount of resources – and that scale beautifully and so you don’t get nailed with CPU charges.
I have not been in a crowd so obsessed with speed and scalability since the Supercomputing crowd in the mid 1990’s – when I wrote my HPC book for O”Reilly – it is refreshing to listen to folks talk about how to write kick-arse software – not just easy software – but the great thing is that it is also pretty easy – you just have to avoid doing any filtering in memory! Hmmm – sounds like http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-13584.
I ran into Chase Phillips of NCSA/NEES project and Nicola Monat-Phillips from NYU – but have not yet run into Casey Dunn – and Casey is easy to spot unless of course he changed his hair style.
Off to the party tonight and open bar – more tomorrow.
Update: I ran into Casey Dunn and David Mills (of Angel) at the evening party.