Amazon is hosting DevCon this week for its software development team. If you could like to join the developer chat you may have a chance to ask questions of Guido van Rossum and other speakers on today’s schedule. The web services team plans to post video and possibly audio, but the summaries are an interesting enough read regardless.
Some excerpts:
- Joel Spolsky: “[P]eople won’t understand where their emotional reactions are coming from. Use this info in real life. Do same thing with software, put people in control, good emotional response, good physical feel, remind them of mom. Make it pretty, get good initial first reaction.”
- Eric Neustadter: “In just under two months, users spent over 69 million hours playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live.”
- Rael Dornfest: “A hacker is a tinkerer, not a bad guy. An experimenter, take stuff apart and see what happens. Put on a brave front, pop the top, see what happens. Unlike MacGyver, we usually don’t make things blow up.”
- Michael Tiemann: “Developer #388 on Apache to get to 100%, top 20 guys are 80%. Most proprietary projects top off at 30-35 people. Consequence is that the marginal activity which ends up as bug fixes, downstream products, and so forth happens for OSS, not for proprietary.”