Today is the last day, well, last morning, of the big ACM conference at my old stomping grounds, UIUC. I’m very surprised it wasn’t overrun with people from Chicago, like myself, who are fans of Joel Spolsky and Robert Cringely, not to mention groupies that want to fawn over some of the lucky winners/founders of some big dot-com and/or media success stories, such as PayPal, YouTube, and Red vs Blue.

But, apparently people in Chicago read the rest of the program list aside from Joel and Max and Cringely, and realized that the other sessions are very academic researchy, and not so interesting. At least, they weren’t for me.

So, what to do in the old stomping grounds with the extra time? Geeking out programming, of course, as well as hitting the best pizza places in CU. Garcia’s, Papa Del’s, and the hidden gem The Jolly Roger. Mm mm mm. Good stuff.

So what useful did come out of the speakers so far? Joel and Max were very inspirational, although with quite different takes on things. Joel is a smart guy and believes in some planning. Max is all about ignoring the business side of things _completely_ and just programming away for 7.5 days solid (his number) until you’ve got a web site that you can show to friends and they can tell you it sucks. Okay, rapid prototyping, I can buy that.

Joel talked about why some gadgets win and some gadgets lose, whether hardware or software, and attributed it to a magic combination of Making Users Happy, Think About Emotions, and Obsess Over Aesthetics. I won’t repeat his talk here, as some people already have heard it at other venues, apparently.

What’s interesting, and a serious oversight, is that both Max and Joel completely ignored marketing and how people will actually find out about your product. Joel ignored it because he was comparing things like iPods and Zens, which are from huge companies and so it is assumed they have a huge marketing budget. Max ignored the marketing side except for a short “use viral marketing” comment, which is a nice theory, but takes approximately a year for anything to happen.

Am I inspired? Yes. Anything earth shattering? Somewhat. I really need to spend more time making my six-year hobby project emotionally satisfying, as well as making it actually work. More on that later…