Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web
Joel and Jeff sit down with Joel's business partner Michael Pryor to discuss the wonders of the Computer History Museum, the value of meta, the D.I.Y. ethos, and whether studying black hat techniques is important to programmers.
Under Tony Hsieh's leadership as CEO, Zappos.com has grown gross merchandise sales from $1.6 million in 2000 to $840 million in 2008. In this presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference, Tony Hsieh talks about his initial business background and how those experiences influenced him to focus on corporate culture. He discusses why he thinks culture is so important, and provides numerous examples that reinforce the importance of culture at Zappos.
Chris Messina has been an advocate of an open, social Web for many years. In this talk at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, Chris outlines potential problems with the current "walled garden" ideology of the major social networks and how the DiSo project aims to tackle them.
You know you've been there! You're pulling your hair out trying to debug some Javascript code that's making your company's home page crash, but you just can't find the error. Before you end up bald, or balder, then maybe Firebug can offer some help. With a powerful, yet easy-to-use web-site inspector, Firebug can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. In this session John J. Barton demonstrates Firebug's JavaScript performance analysis and debugging capabilities for dynamic JavaScript web pages.
When the economy turns sour, websites for job seekers and career changers become more popular then ever. At Path101.com, the tagline is community-powered career discovery. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, Path101's CEO Charlie O'Donnell and Scientist/Data Wizard Hilary Mason discuss how the site's users contribute data about themselves, learn about one another's career trajectories, and connect with recruiters.
Joel and Jeff sit down with Steve Yegge to discuss his JavaScript compilation project, a generalized "Google-y" approach for plugging language support into editors, and the overall importance and philosophy of language tooling.
John Doerr discusses a range of topics including technology policy in the new Obama administration and his thoughts on the economy and the effect on innovation. He also gives specific advice for startups in the current economic climate. He also talks about recent VC investment direction in the Internet and green technology, the importance of the iPhone as a platform, and includes specific examples of companies and technologies to watch for in the near future.
Jeremy Kemper, one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails framework, talks about various techniques to improve performance in this presentation at the O'Reilly European Rails Conference. This is a must-listen presentation for anyone who is interested in optimizing the performance of Rails-based web applications.
Joel and Jeff, with guest Alex Papadimoulis of The Daily WTF, discuss the distinction between IT/sysadmins and programmers, online justice for webforums, user-friendly IDs for databases, and the future of software distribution.
Economic activity is now driven by creativity. More value is created by communities than by companies, but much of this value is not monetized. In this talk from the 2008 Emerging Communications Conference, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation discusses the balance between openness and proprietary in a world ruled by community participation.
