I’ve been thinking a bit about geek conferences since “The Future of Web Apps” took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, a couple of interesting conversational threads that it inspired.

The first was best summarised by Chris Messina in his piece “The Future of White Boy clubs” (executive summary: “far too many speakers and attendees at these things are white men; how do we change that?”).

The second cropped up in multiple conversations. For a lot of attendees FoWA was an odd conference, because they’d seen most of the speakers giving similar talks before, usually some time in the past 12 months. This isn’t a criticism of FoWA as such - what they built, very successfully, was a cheap, quick and engaging “Best Web Conference Speeches in the world… Ever!” album.

I personally found it very rewarding, but I’m a latecomer to the conference scene, and haven’t done the usual round of SXSW Interactive, Etech, OsCon, FooCamp/BarCamp, etcetera.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a lot of ‘alpha geeks’ attend too many conferences; that there are only so many things to talk about. But conferences are hugely useful in providing ‘face time’ with creative people from all over the world, and every occasion provides opportunities for new connections and conversations. Maybe the problem isn’t the number of conferences, but the fact that they’re all focussed around listening to clever people talk about… stuff.

There might be a solution to all this, though, and I think I saw it pioneered this weekend on the main Yahoo! campus.

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I feel like a failure.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens. (more…)

We never had a modem at home (the call costs in the UK were ridiculous), so my first serious encounter with the Internet happened when I got to university in 1996. I spent hours in college computer rooms, falling in love with the endless reams of useless information and software which were already floating around the web.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” - the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different - as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr. (more…)

So I hit a bit of a slump over the past month or so. It was partly due to a slow transition of my duties at work, partly due to tiredness, and partly due to the fact that I’m basically a lazy slob.

I always feel terrible where I hit a point where I can’t seem to get things done, although a host of evidence indicates that I’m not alone in this, from sites like lifehacker and diyplanner to the instant cult status of the “Getting Things Done” method.

I think a whole book on getting your act together is a little much - the key for me at least is simplicity in a method. And I’ve finally started to work myself out of the unproductivity hole with a very simple method indeed, so I thought I’d share it. (more…)

I wrote this a while ago, and then forgot to post it. Although I’ve since switched to commuting by train, I do occasionally carpool when I have errands I need to run. And meanwhile, the situation on the Bay’s busiest freeway remains the same…

I never get tired of watching the rush-hour drivers toiling in 3 lanes of traffic on 101.

Every day there is a sea of perplexedness, frustration and boredom stretching 40 miles, endless hands dangling out of their car windows or fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

I’ll admit, I’m a little smug, but then I’m habitually sitting on a bus or driving with a passenger and I’m in the relatively supersonic carpool lane. At least until I hit Redwood City.
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The kid leaned out of the dented Camry’s passenger side and yelled at me.

“Hey! Wezzak wibnekfahtilbrid…”

The car rattled on up the hill, and another cherished memory died in me.

See, 20 years ago I would have been that kid, mind awash with devastating leaf-baked insults, hurling them at pedestrians like so much free candy.

“That told ‘em”, we’d think. Only it didn’t tell ‘em. Tangled in a 25mph slipstream, the syllables tore apart. The witty words became a foolish jumble.

Back then, oblivious, I’d pull my head back into the car laughing so hard that my guts hurt. One night on Market it was too much; the laughter stuck in my stomach and turned it inside out.

I horked up a whole one-pound burrito, slightly digested, into Brian’s glovebox. His rust-bucket Mustang wasn’t worth two dimes as scrap metal and he said he didn’t mind. But even through the post-spew blur I caught that resigned tightening of his jaw.

Me and Brian always walked places after that.

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There are lots of little signs that will tell you you’ve really started to settle into a life on the West Coast - regular social outings, the first time you can navigate from Santa Clara to Redwood City without a map, and my favourite - the first “you’re pre-approved for a credit card!” junkmail, which tells you that you’ve finally racked up some form of Credit Rating.

But even after the initial hard work is done and you really feel like you’ve arrived, there are still areas where you’ll find that you need to ever-refine your behaviours and expectations in order to increase your “comfort zone”. Are there five areas worth exploring with this in mind? Youbetcha! (more…)

Checking into the airport for your “relocation flight” is a profound moment. When you finally walk through security and wait to board the flight, you’re crossing the threshold. Things are in motion at last - all the planning, the paperwork, the goodbyes and the waiting have paid off. This is where a new life starts.

But that’s just the problem, too - what awaits you at the other end of the journey? There are some definite hurdles to jump. Here are 5 of the biggest ones you’ll face. (more…)

I do know a few people who’ve worked diligently and carefully to maneuvre themselves into overseas job positions, but for the majority a relocation offer from your company (or a company which wishes to recruit you) can come as something of a surprise.

There is a lot to think about if you have the opportunity to relocate, and unraveling all the knots can be difficult, particularly if there’s some pressure to provide an answer to the offer.

I’ll admit that it didn’t take me long to accept my own offer verbally, in principle. It was made on a stifling Friday afternoon in a Sunnyvale conference room; I accepted the offer on the following Monday. My reasoning was simple - this was potentially a unique offer. If I moved to California and hated it, I could always move back. If I declined, I was left with a potential lifetime of “what if?”s.

Nevertheless, the process of moving is a complicated one, and it’s worth being prepared for all the steps. (more…)

Out of the blue just recently, I got a comment on a rather old article, from someone called Ian

Ian wrote:

Hey - i found this blog while searching for information on moving to Northern California from the Uk…

Similar to you, I have been offered the chance to move with work out there, and would love to hear any tips/reccomendations you can give!

There are various nuggets of information buried in articles on this site, but I thought that for Ian’s sake (and given the seeming rise in Valley-bound immigrants blown here by bubble2.0) I’d re-capture some of the advice as concisely as possible.

There are 3 posts I’m going to write on this subject, each covering 5 useful areas that I think every immigrant should know about. This is all (as always) from the point-of-view of an Englishman relocating to Northern California, but I hope that it’s useful for any English-speaker who might be pondering a relocation to the US.

The first two parts are now available. Part III is coming Real Soon Now(TM).

• Relocating, Part I (”before you move”)
• Relocating, Part II (”arriving in America”)
• Relocating, Part III (”settling down”)

In addition to the points I cover here, I’ll provide one book reference:

“Living and Working in America” by David Hampshire (Survival Books, ISBN 1 901130 61 4)
[On Amazon UK | On Amazon.com ]

I can’t recommend this book highly enough - it answers almost every question you could have, and is a big comfort to have around as a reassuring advisor whilst you’re leaping into the unknown.