Dev Summit Wednesday Keynote

Apparently a Cooper nowadays designs the UI to programs, not barrels. Alan Cooper's talk was informative, especially to people who are (or want to) manage geeks. Talking points:

• Making money moving atoms vs. making money moving bits- a little bit tired at this point to people who are used to computers; the key to remember with this point is that there are still many people who don't understand the difference.


• Things like finance are now commodities/utilitarian in nature- having it (or having good implementations) don't help; not having hurts. Rejoinder: if that's the case, why do so many public companies still have bad financial practices?


• Software isn't a commodity; it's a craft. My response: It isn't, yet. One of the big things Dev Summit has shown is that the bar for making really good online mapping applications with custom data is going to be lowered, quick. With other projects allowing for easy creation of mini-apps (Yahoo Pipes) and the mapping projects only being a part of software development), the bottom of the programming market is going to drop even faster as every high school sophomore is going to make their own app 'cause they can


• The distinction between interface engineers, design engineers and production engineers is important. Controlling the UI (both software & human side), sketching out the functionality and finally making the code so it doesn't break are three separate tasks; I certainly can't do them equally well.


• Finally: an Eisenhower quote: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

A good keynote speaker, but probably not what every attendee was looking for (aside from reassurance that they're a special class of worker, for now).