SxSW 2010
South by Southwest 2010
Referred to as "spring break for nerds", SXSW is held in Austin Texas. No, I don't have any idea where that is either, and I'm currently sitting there, typing this up. Phones get confused when they come out here, often flashing error messages and crying out for their respective carriers to come save them.
People get confused when they come out here as well, but they seem to solve this by drinking. A lot.
Overall there are three parts, "Interactive", "Film", and "Music". "Music" is a BIG deal in Austin. It's the Live Music Capital Of The World. I know, because there's a sign about every 3 feet telling me this. (To be fair, in the airport alone, there are four live music acts going at the same time as I type). However, this year "Interactive" has pulled ahead to be the most attended part of SXSW.
Below are bits of information I've gathered over the 6 days I've been here. Some useful, some not, and some gained through very painful experience.
Tech:
imgur - serves out 600 million images a month, 80TB of data transfered. For this, they use the Voxel CDN, and an application backend with 20 app servers, each running 20 app processes. They have 1 million images (?!?), with an average size of 150KB, so they only have 150GB primary storage needs.
Very popular app seen on laptops: TweetDeck
Several ops folks from larger web properties (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) seemed to lean towards the idea that at a certain scale, interactive usage shouldn't be allowed to hit disk. Caches should flush to disk behind the scenes.
Foursquare is very popular here. It's odd to see that my phone has more of a social life than I do. There's also another service called Gowalla is trying to compete for the same idea (but I didn't see anywhere near as many people using it).
More and more sites seem to be using PostgreSQL/MySQL as big, consistent key-value stores (not even normalized usually), and pushing all of the other "data access work" up to the distributed data stores (Cassandra, Redis, Hadoop, etc.)
The number of insecure credentials going over wifi has to be MASSIVE.
I'm pretty sure there's no network wifi, 3g, gsm, or otherwise out there that can survive 5,000 people being within a single auditorium, all tweeting "this speaker sucks!" at the same time.
Facebook has a 40TB (not a typo) memcache setup. <voice type="outraged">That's not right!</voice>
Joi Ito: There are very few ideas that shouldn't be prototype-able within 1-2 weeks. Running code trumps PowerPoint for getting your concept across every time.
Expanded definition of "your failed business model is not my problem" meta-issue, from Clay Shirky:
Imagine you're walking on the street, and a little old lady approaches you. She's clearly going to ask you a question.
- Pretend she asks you for money.
Consider that request makes you feel for a moment.- Pretend she instead asks you for help walking across the street.
Hold onto that feeling for a moment as well.- Pretend she instead asks you for directions to somewhere nearby.
And remember this feeling also.These three
feelings are three "base" types of sharing that have been identified. Each has a very distinct type of emotional reaction & implications. Specifically, there's:
- Sharing goods - We tend to NOT want to share these, as if I give you something, I no longer have it. Restricted to more "good friends and close relationships".
- Sharing services - We're ambivalent about this, because often the value of the effort isn't worth the return, but there's the whole world of fluffy social constructs that helps us navigate this.
- Sharing information - We're very open about this. (With exception of private info, more later.) We're biased to like doing this by evolution. Also, the opposite of this behavior? Being spiteful. Again, we're rigged to dislike that behavior.
Music used to be a "sharing goods" behavior (I give you my Vanilla Ice CD, I no longer have it), then it turned into a "sharing services" behavior (I can make you a mixtape of Vanilla Ice, but it takes time), and now it's a "sharing information" behavior (I'll send you this copy of Vanilla Ice). ACTA, DMCA, and other regulations are an attempt to regulate "spiteful" behavior for information sharing. They are destined not to have the consequences the music/movie industries think they will get.
More bits from Clay Shirky:
- Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.
- Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
- Greatest points of infliction are where no one is looking.
Food & other logistics:
Peche is AWESOME.
Annie's Cafe & Bar is quite good for breakfast.
Shit shuts down on Sunday. Plan accordingly.
Italian Sunset: Gin, Lime juice, and Aperol - Excellent.
A drink I've forgotten the name of, but it was really good and really popular: Green Chartreuse, Yellow Chartreuse, Gin, Simple Syrup, and Lime juice.
Beware the second order effects of absinthe (thanks @avi4now for the reference). On its own, I just can't see drinking enough to hallucinate. However, the amount of booze I had to drink in order to GET RID OF THE TASTE made the next morning very unpleasant.
Rihaku "wandering poet" sake - not bad. fruity.
Wakatake "demon slayer" sake - better than the wandering poet. A touch dryer, but still lots of sweetness.
If at all possible, get a hotel close to the convention center. Shuttles are nice, but they add cognitive load at the end of the night to "Should I stay out any more?"
Also, logistics would seem to indicate: Don't try to check out on Tuesday if you plan on attending on Tuesday. No bag check at the convention center.
Misc:
A large part of the value of SXSW is in attending it to meet and greet. If you don't have many people to meet, it's not as valuable. This is a cumulative thing that builds up over the years. I will say this year there were portions that felt lonely.
Repeated quote: "The Internet is like Mexican food - it's the same ingredients, just in different combinations"
