StartechConf 2011

I came away very happy from StartechConf 2011. I have to congratulate its organizing team.

It was 2 very intense days of high-quality talks, and the guests were top-notch. We’re talking about speakers who are extremely well known on the worldwide development conference circuit.

I think everyone who attended learned a lot. Some of you, dear readers (those using modern browsers), will notice that I picked up a bit of CSS3 after the excellent talks by the couple formed by Stephanie Sullivan Rewis (@stefsull on Twitter) and her husband Greg Rewis (@garazi on Twitter).

It’s true that most of the talks leaned toward front-end development (HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, etc.). But there was also something for the back end, and we had a very good conceptual talk on relational and non-relational databases given by Mark Ramm (@markramm), a talk I paid special attention to, since it’s one of the topics keeping me busy these days. While I’m at it, let me tell you that this Thursday we’re holding a MeetUp of the Dcc8090 group together with Ubaldo Taladriz (@utaladriz) at the Colegio de Ingenieros, a talk on non-relational databases where we’ll share our experiences. We’ll be expecting you on Thursday at 7:30 PM; you can sign up here and there will be streaming on this very blog, in case you can’t make it.

Personally, the 2 talks I liked most, mainly because they were given by people I admire for what they’re doing, were the by now classic A Tale of Three Trees, by Scott Chacon, who surprised us by giving it in perfect Spanish, presenting it as Un Cuento de Tres Arboles.

Who is Scott Chacon? Well, he’s the author of the book Pro Git, from which several of us learned to use this tool. Let’s say that with this photo I’m 1 degree of separation from Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux and of course of Git), because Scott maintains the official site of the Git community. By pure chance we ended up sitting next to each other during Greg Rewis’s talk, and we shared a few minutes. That’s part of what this kind of conference gives you: the chance to meet great developers and, of course, to do some “networking”, as the pretentious crowd likes to say.

I made the arrangements to take my team of developers to the event, and my company not only paid for our tickets, it also made it easy for them to attend without any trouble. I should say the ticket price helped quite a bit in making this an easier decision for the organization ;). But I thought it was a chance to motivate my team with an event of this kind. If you have a team of developers, well, start saving up for next year and take them to StartechConf 2012. You’ll see how good everyone feels; it’s a way of optimizing through happiness. Which brings me to the talk I liked best.

Optimizing for Happiness is the name of the talk by Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub. I’m not going to go into the details of this talk, because I think the ideas he raises deserve a post of their own. But if you’re an entrepreneur, or an executive, or the head of a team of any kind, not necessarily in technology development, you should ask yourself what people’s intrinsic motivators are. And one of them is that people seek to be happy (or to feel happy as much of the time as possible, to be consistent with my view of happiness).

The leitmotif of @mojombo’s talk is framed as a question: what is the ROI of happiness? What is the return on investment in the team’s happiness? If the people you work with are happy, then they won’t just be more productive, they’ll produce a better quality product or service. I won’t go on about it, but I’ll leave you a link to a book Tom recommends in his talk: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by David Pink¹.

Finally, I want to thank and congratulate the organizing team. They really showed that it’s possible to put on a world-class conference in this country. Having been to several here and abroad, I can tell you this conference is of very high quality. Congratulations; I think you’ve made a great contribution to the country, and you set a very high bar for many of the conferences held here (including the ones put on by big companies and multinationals; you did it better, believe me).

In particular, a big shout-out to Leo Soto, one of the organizers, one of the really good developers we have in Chile, whom I had the honor of meeting. I’m eagerly awaiting the 2012 edition.