BROOMFIELD, Colo. – A crowd of more than 450 packed the ballroom at the Omni Resort in Broomfield, Colo., Wednesday morning for the third annual Glue Conference. Organizer Eric Norlin delivered the welcome and noted a surprising number in the room were first-time attendees.
The program kicked off with a keynote by Chris Hoff of Juniper Networks, a security expert who challenged the primarily developer audience to see things the way security people do, to understand the discipline better. According to Hoff, there’s a disconnect or a proper lack of respect, between these two groups. He explained why with a very entertaining talk, which obviously struck a chord as his slide deck was called out as “hot” later in the morning by Slideshare. He labeled it “Plea to have devs evangelize to and enroll security in their efforts as it relates to security of their platforms.”
As if one cheeky-good, wake-up keynote wasn’t enough, we got a second – this one from James Governor, who founded non-traditional analyst firm Redmonk. His highly caffeinated and animated talk was hugely tweeted and also got the award for longest title: “Foragers, Farmers, Forks & Forges: On Software, Patronage and Craft Brewing.”
One tweet, from @jrwashburn, summarized a good part of the talk: “Software eating world: quantified self eats healthcare (fitbit), gaming eats pharma (fold.it).” The alpha-geek centric audience loved it.
But wait, there was more: The ever-popular John Musser of Programmable Web took the stage next to deliver his annual “State of APIs” talk, updated with all the latest stats, including the latest “billion-API-calls” list, and a fascinating look at how the business models of the API industry are proliferating.
Breakout sessions rounded out the morning, with six talks that included a “NoSQL Smackdown;” how to build a two-tier mobile app (Salesforce); a cloud infrastructure talk from Eucalyptus; “The Badass Beyond Hadoop” according to Cloudant; and the CEO of MongoLab, Will Shulman, on “Why MongoDB + Node.js is the New Server-Side Stack.”
A packed afternoon followed with three workshops (by Netflix, VMware and Cloudant), simultaneously occurring as a total of 18 specific breakout-session talks played out across three tracks.
I focused on the Mobile Track, first hearing Cambridge, Mass.-based startup Kinvey (“convey”) announce its latest mobile backend-as-a-service offering. Also, Sam Ramji of Apigee presented “Architecting for Performance in the Face of Mobile and APIs.”
Wrapping the day, Laura Merling, application enablement exec at Alcatel-Lucent, delivered a talk on “Beer and APIs,” focusing on “craft” telcos and of course whetting the collective thirst of the packed room, which was quite ready to bolt to the happy-hour reception. But, Merling kept their attention to the end, closing with three bold predictions: The data plan dies (big cheers!); emerging markets will rule; and “one of our own” will be the next big telco CEO.
Check out Graeme Thickins live blog from Gluecon here
