Google on

Amit Singh, questions, answers, Xcoders.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by Amit Singh at the Seattle Xcoders meeting held in the Google offices in Fremont.

Amit is the author of Mac OS X Internals, a book eclipsing the 1600 page mark (according to Amazon) making it one of the longest technical books I’ve ever seen. He spent some talking about his experience writing:

no editors checked on him because most technical authors give up
eight to nine chapters were cut from the already monstrous book
he claims to not be an author and has no interest in writing another book
he spent months at a time writing most of which he found all-consuming

I didn’t find much value in the technical content of the talk (not because of Amit but because I’m rarely in a position to need details at this level of the OS and I do have some Mach background from NeXT days) but the feedback on authorship was worth attending to confirm what I already suspected. I’ve been approached about book writing before but have balked because of the time commitment and lack of financial reward – I find writing technical articles and blog posts time consuming enough.

Google Seattle Conference on Scalability -- 2008 Edition.

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

I was really looking forward to this conference based on my experience last year, with the likes of Jeff Dean and Marissa Mayer presenting. When I saw the original agenda for Saturday I was excited to see they expanded the number of talks at the expense of having to make a decision about which presentation to attend, a task at which I often feel I failed.

When I arrived, late, I was surprised to see they decided to change the format and rather than have two tracks for each session, the presentations were shorten so everyone could attend every talk. I’m not sure how much notice the presenters were given of this decision because a number had presentations well exceeding the diminished time frame. As a conference presenter myself, I know that a well re-hearsed presentation can be difficult to amend on the fly.

Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I went to the conference last year and have been anxiously awaiting the speakers and session list for this year. It’s out and my RSVP has been confirmed.

It’s a fantastic one-day conference with very little of the fluff or this-is-how-you-do-‘Hello World’ seen at some of the larger conferences. It’s worth attending if you can make it.