Day 3 of Trip to Google IO - In The Court of The Crimson King

What a difference a day can make! All the tech snobbery in the world couldn’t hold a candle to the handful of legends I came across today. Before I go any further and risk losing your attention, shout-outs go out to the following heroes of life…

Abdul-Karriem Khan spells one passionate and energetic developer. At the end of Steve Souder’s presentation (mentioned below) Abdul stepped up to the microphone to voice his disagreement as to the source of IE’s (Microsoft Internet Explorer) dilemma, accusing IE developers of being irresponsible and apathetic, failing to resolve a crippling memory leak that has plagued the browser ever since the word “Firefox” started being thrown around and perhaps even before. Abdul went on, becoming increasingly emotional and angry as he made a pretty persuasive case, noting that fortune alone has allowed such ineptitude to survive, and only Microsoft is capable of doing it for so long. Abdul reminded me of the video of the wrestling fan who breaks down asking a question to a group of wrestlers. I think of it not because I challenge the legitimacy or frown upon the fan or Abdul’s display of emotion. In fact, it’s quite the opposite because unlike the majority of humankind’s numb zombie drones, these people still feel, brave enough to go all the way out to the end of that limb and openly love something like wrestling or code development. I’d be lying if I said such occurrences aren’t really REALLY hilarious, but I wouldn’t laugh as hard as I do if I didn’t think it beautiful. I can’t wait until the session videos come out next week. Because I’ll definitely be adding that one to my favorites and hoping my man Abdul continues his celebrity status.

Steve Souders‘ presentation marked a turning point in the conference to me. I had grown used to taking away whatever I could from the presentations by the presumably brilliant but inarticulate Google wunderkind. Coming all the way from Baltimore, I was trying hard to fight off any notion of disappointment in the event when Steve took the stage. From the very start, his sincere interest and intense involvement in load-time optimization just beamed out of him, and the audience was on his every word. A model presenter for all of Google’s promising young minds, his excitement for the subject matter was contagious because he put effort into placing his concepts at a level that was easy enough for the crowd to run with, and chose to cover three of his bullets tactfully and carefully instead of racing to get through all ten. People always react positively when they see someone who loves what they study, and this was enough to get me excited about both load optimization and the conference all over again. Just in time too, because the next few hours would redeem and exceed my expectations.

The YouTube employee who took this photo (sucks I didn’t get his name). He wasn’t too cool to laugh at my picture idea and the t-shirt was entirely his contribution. On the job, he was busy answering people’s questions but still hooked me up with some serious schwag. When the other employees were sort of stand-offish and too cool to care, the force was strong with this one, and another…

Chris Prince also seemed to have an appreciation for Abdul’s energy, explaining he had experienced it earlier when Abdul posed a question at his presentation. Chris was on the job which limited our conversation, but it was easy to tell that he was one of the more pleasant and enlightened ones. After excusing himself to go take care of business, he soon came back to make sure I got my picture with the Google sign. Seemingly in-touch with the grander scheme of things, this guy obviously “gets it.”

The last session I attended was the one about search friendly websites. Having stumbled around these concepts for quite sometime now, I was at the head of the class in a very literal sense sitting in the very front row engaging and pestering the speaker with questions throughout the entire session. I really enjoyed this presentation because it both reinforced my understanding and reminded me of some details I overlooked and need to go back and scrutinize. It also provided a better sense of clarity and confidence hearing it from a person rather than speculating on trial and error. I was really impressed with the speaker because while she seemed nervous and went a little fast, she kept her finger on the pulse and gauged how well she was getting across to her audience. The best part about this session is I made a friend named Andrew who is native to San Francisco. He got me to sign up to twitter, flickr, and feedburner all at once when I got back to the hotel with the intention of integrating them into this website. I guess I tend to overlook the easy things, you know, those popular internet trends you have to be pretty stupid not to notice. Speaking of which, I better get my head out of my ass and into San Francisco. Giants game tonight and maybe a party or something afterwards. Nothing is certain though and after the game I’ll probably check to see what’s up on twitter.