I really want to make Google I/O Developer's conference. At $400US for the 2 days, it's the most affordably priced developer conference I've seen so far. As an example, Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developer's Conference) starts its minimum ticket at over $1500USD. Unfortunately, San Francisco is pretty far from Trinidad, a ticket there borders on $800USD, and nightly accomodations will range anywhere between $200-$300 USD per night.
At over 6$TT to $1USD, I'm looking at quite a hefty amount, somewhere in the realm of a years' worth of savings if I want to make this dream happen.
I'm going to try several options to make it happen, and then deal with the issue of convincing my new employer, a staunch Microsoft shop, to give me the time off to go learn Google tools.
The next best thing though is watching various videos on Google's YouTube channels. For the developer, there are the GoogleDeveloper and GoogleDeveloperDays channels. There is also a generic Google channel, as well as a Google.org channel for promoting their philanthropical initiatives, and AtGoogleTalks where they publish videos from the various guest speaker events they have at Google. One new community oriented video channel, the GoogleDocsCommunity channel, is geared at pushing community oriented content for using their GoogleDocs product, and also a possible template for future community oriented channels.
Don't get me wrong, I have no qualms about reading wikis or technical manuals to get ramped up on new technologies, reading about things such as BigTable and GFS get me excited about these ideas as well.
Seeing these "wonder" tools and products in action via video have a greater "get excited" effect on me that transcends the reading experience. It literally has me feeling "pumped up" about being a software developer in today's world.
I'm hoping the content from Google I/O makes it to one of these channels eventually, because I have found the past ones extremely useful in getting me up to speed pretty quickly on the new tools out there.
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