Geeks in Boston

I’m rewriting this post to note, with relief, that http://devboston.pbwiki.com/ is back to normal. See you tomorrow!

Today I’m up in Manchester, NH at BarCamp Manchester. It is quite different from BarCamp Boston, even though it’s just an hour away. The first difference I notice: I’m not an organizer. This means I don’t have to run around making sure nobody’s hair is on fire, and can focus on the presentations. But the first difference most people will notice is that it’s smaller and quieter.

Right now I’d guess there are about 50 people here, which is about a third of BCB’s Saturday attendees. A smaller camp doesn’t mean good or bad– just different. I haven’t found many common threads of interest; this may be because I ran a bit late and missed the initial milling about / introductions. Or it may be because there aren’t as many people with the same deep technical interests as me. I’m hoping to meet some of them at 1:30 when my boss Jim Cowie and I will give a presentation about BGP data mining, and how Renesys came to do what it does.

Now it’s time for lunch. More updates to come.

Do you have a backlog of cool project ideas you’re just itching to work on?

Would you enjoy meeting up with a bunch of other hackers and designers, for one intense day of design and development?

Then come to the first DevHouseBoston event on Saturday, December 9 at 11am at Permabit near Kendall Square. Food and wifi will be provided; teams and projects will be assembled on the fly.

DevHouseBoston info and registration

DevHouseBoston #1 is a production of Brian Del Vecchio, John Resig, Shimon Rura, and Patrick Haney. Can you buy us some pizza? Join our email list and become a sponsor.

Today brings news that everyone’s favorite Davis-square-based-alien-mascot-bearing startup, Reddit, has been acquired by CodneNet, the digital-internet-Wired portion of magazine giant Conde Nast.

Reddit soaks up all my slack time for reading online. The New Yorker brings dozens of physical pages worth reading every week. So I must also congratulate Conde Nast on completing their virtual monopolization of my news intake.

Unfortunately the Reddit guys will be moving to CodeNet HQ in San Francisco. We’ll miss you guys, but wish you all the best in your new digs. Congratulations!

The Boston Startup Meetup (join the email list) is an informal local gathering of people interested in startups. We’ve been meeting since Fall 2005, mostly for dinners, and meetings tend to have about 25-35 people at all levels of startup experience — from hackers with a cool idea to serial entrepreneurs and investors.

DATE: Tuesday, October 3rd at 7:00pm
PLACE: Smile Thai Cafe, 16-18 Eliot St, Harvard Sq ( http://www.smilethaicafe.com/ )

RSVP: http://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?event=IBDXHRCXXRJXKRQTIXYN

I hope to see many familiar and many new faces!

Shimon Rura

Local Y-Combinator startup Kiko is up for sale on eBay. Having made fun of calendaring apps in the past, this isn’t exactly shocking, and you have to respect the Kiko founders’ willingness to let go. For sale is the domain name, the web hosting account, and all Kiko intellectual property including the software; as well as the option to buy a week of consulting time from the founders for $1500.

Now the big question is whether it’ll sell. Most of the recent, smaller tech acquisitions seem to be thinly veiled signing bonuses. Perhaps owning upcoming.org isn’t that important to Yahoo! — they could rebuild it in a few weeks — but it is a sign of hiring a highly competent person. As alternative to recruiters that charge $7000 per hire, an acquisition that binds a small group of people to your company for 3-5 years while their stock vests could easily be worth several tens of thousands. But without the option to acquire the Kiko team, I’m not sure who would buy their domain and software.

After all, who sits around with $50k wondering “gee, I wish I could get myself a neat but young implementation of something Google is really good at?”

Update: Tucows, the buyer, explains. Pretty convincing logic, actually.

John Resig, Patrick Haney, and I are plotting to bring SuperHappyDevHouse to Boston. SHDH is an event for hackers to get together, build cool things, and just hang out. It’s informal and unstructured, and will probably have between 20 and 50 participants. We need a venue that can accomodate about that many people with space and wifi for one weekend day and/or night. Location preferably T-accessible in Cambridge/Boston. A corporate office or large house would work great. Any ideas?

The Boston Startup Meetup (email list) is an informal local gathering of people interested in startups.  We’ve been meeting since Fall 2005, mostly for dinners, and meetings tend to have about 25-35 people at all levels of startup experience — from hackers with a cool idea to serial entrepreneurs and investors.

DATE: Thursday, July 6th at 7:00pm
PLACE: Smile Thai Cafe, 16-18 Eliot St, Harvard Sq (http://www.smilethaicafe.com/)

RSVP: http://www.evite.com/schedule/view?event=QAMCXOQNUQQEYNPKNINJ

I hope to see you there!

shimon.

With all the meetups and events happening around Boston (see the sidebar at geeksinboston.com), I’m starting to feel like the tech community here is doing pretty well. But one important constituency I rarely see is students. This seems odd, since there are usually lots of recent graduates; especially at entrepreneur-focused events like the startup meetup. Still, at the technical events and even BarCamp, it’s normal to see only 1 or 2 students.

On one hand, it’s understandable that students will naturally tend to act within their existing, convenient, local university community rather than a larger, more amorphous Boston techie community. On the other hand, the presence of great universities is clearly a sustaining influence for this city’s go-read-your-books vibe, and a source of many valuable research and startup partnerships. So why can’t I think of more than 2 students who might be worth recruiting for part-time or internship work? The theory is that a competent student can, with some supervision, work passionately and productively for cheap.

One possible explanation is scarcity. The average computer science student probably expects a job at a big, stable corporation that will offer them well-packaged, skill-appropriate work for a year or two while they learn. Thirty years ago, that corporation was Digital Electronics in Maynard, MA; now it’s Intel, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Monster now occupies the former home of Digital, but probably hires far fewer college graduates than any one of these big, West coast companies. People who don’t need this sort of two-year training cycle before becoming productive hackers are naturally rare; and if we have to fetch back from California the ones who do, that’s an added challenge.

If competent students are scarce, are we doing enough to connect with them while they’re still in school around here? It’s one thing for a big company to set up a table at a job fair or schedule interviews at a school’s career placement office. It’s quite another for there to be a strong network of relationships between people in companies and universities, such that a professor will automatically refer her top students to work with startups run by her friends. Do we need more of the latter? How can we get it?

Update 11 Jun 2006: fixed links to point at edited version.

Chris Brogan has released Sounds of BarCamp Boston, a compilation of interviews and brief commentary about BarCamp Boston that I think gives a good sense of the event before diving into a bit of a monologue from Adam Green about OPML and feeds (ends around 20:00 into the MP3.)

Sounds of BarCamp Boston on Chris Brogan’s Blog

Download MP3