Google I/O, 2013

I've been lucky enough to attend every Google I/O conference and hit up San Francisco for I/O 2013 a few weeks ago.  This year, I went with four colleagues lucky enough to also score tickets before the conference sold out in under an hour for the third consecutive year.  We had a great time, learned lots o' new things, and got in some solid team camaraderie.  My general thoughts from the conference this year...

Keynote

They keynote was a bit of a letdown.  They kind of broke it into thirds - android, google+ and maps (I realize that's not exactly accurate, but it's close enough).  The android portion was fantastic, it was basically developer porn, and I'm not even an android developer.  The new IDE, awesome rollout features, and new APIs filled a solid hour full of announcements for android developers.  From there, the keynote turned into a product announcement press release.  They went deeply into google+ and images and the new google maps - sure, both are cool, but they just didn't make sense in a developer conference keynote.  I really liked the "grand finale" with Larry Page coming out and just speaking his mind and answering questions.  I'm not necessarily a fanboy of Page, but I really like hearing smart and successful people come out and just talk, without tons of scripting.

I was hella surprised there was not even a mention of Glass or Compute Engine in the keynote.

Sessions

The sessions were awesome!  Seriously awesome.  I really don't understand why they didn't announce some of the session announcements in the keynote . 

• Google Compute Engine is now in General Availability.  Woot!  It's still a little more expensive than AWS, but it looks like a really solid option.
• App Engine supports PHP.  That's a pretty big deal... it was the most requested item on their tracker since the initial launch of app engine.  It also seems to signal that Google really does care about developers building applications on app engine.  I didn't really love all the demos and talk centering around "look, you can run WordPress on it!", 'cause PHP developers do more than install WordPress, but I can't really blame them for that.  I'd rather they'd demoed a popular framework running on it.  Either way, it's big news, and IMO should've been in the keynote.  [disclaimer: I do a lot of PHP dev at my day job, but I am not a PHP fanboy.  I mostly hate PHP.]
• Web Components are a comin'.  And yeeeeaaaah, they look nice.  Still a ways off and a lot of progress to be made, but damn they look great.  Hopefully the standards weenies will buy in and not fight it.  I went to two solid sessions on web components.
• Dart is maturing pretty rapidly.  Lots of solid features and more improvements on the way.  Looks like performance has really gotten a solid boost lately.

Generally, from the session I went to and the ones my colleagues mentioned, I'd say the speakers really did a killer job this year.  They went well beyond the usual conference "tutorial" sessions where you could have just read the info on your own and packed this year's shorter sessions with tons of great info.  My favorite sessions are the ones where people talk about what they do, and there was a lot of that this year.  Hooray!

Chromebook Pixel

This year's conference gift was the Chromebook Pixel.  What a killer device.  It's my fourth chromebook (first was the cr-48 early adopter preview machine, then the google i/o first gen samsung, then the chromebox last year) and is the first one that I really want to use all the time.  The design is crazy slick and performance is great.  The surprising parts include the screen and the sound. The screen is really truly unreal.  My wife and I watched Amazon Video on Demand last night and she said "jeez, this is better than our TV".  The audio is really quite solid for a laptop - no deep bass, but it's loud and the quality aside from the expected lack of bass is pretty great.  Would I pay $1300 for it.... hmmm... maybe?  Considering the answer woulda been hell no a month ago, I think that says a lot.  I'm trying to use it as my dev machine now, thought the limitations are somewhat hurting that.  I've settled on shiftedit for my IDE and it's working out pretty well so far.  

That said, I was kind of hoping they'd end the gifts this year so developers wanting to actually learn things and not just get handouts would be able to get tickets in the future.

After Hours

This was the second after hours I attempted to go to and I stayed just long enough to get food, then say "fuck this" and go back to the hotel.  Luckily, the guys I was there with had the same feeling.  It was just waaaaay too crowded.  David Bowie is a pretty damn cool performer, though.  Good call there.