First two talks were great (Jay Philips on Adhearsion, Dan Grigsby on hacking the market, basically). While on different topics altogether, both were plugging a common theme here: keep coming up with new ideas, set out on your own, and if you look for the niches and cracks you can fill in the market, you can exploit/hack those efficiencies to your advantage and really make it as an indie with a few friends and not work for the man, so to speak.
Which we already knew (or at least hope) is the case, but it’s awesome having these folks sharing their experiences, ideas, and methods of doing it themselves. It’s basically a lot of people who have that kind of “hack everything” mentality that is the focus of the HOPE/2600 folks and apply it to the question, “how can I set out for myself as a hacker and make a living?”
Also: the memcached talk was a totally excellent geek-out on caching.
Next talk is called “Living on the Edge,” and it’s about what’s going on in Merb edge development, but you see how it fits the broader theme by title.
There’s a great community here in Toronto, looking forward to meeting some New Yorkers and seeing if we have this kind of community back in NYC and Jerz.
More to come.