At The Source

Yesterday I went to the WebGuild 2006 Conference. This involved me dipping my feet in the water of Industry Conferences - it was a relatively inexpensive one-day conference about the current state and future direction of the World Wide Web. I enjoyed it immensely, despite one or two of the presentations being a bit dull. It really struck me what I was involved in while I was sat amongst about 200 Silicon Valley web professionals listening to Marissa Mayer talk about the history and design philosophy behind the Google homepage. Not some wannabe Internet company, but Google! She has been personally involved in setting the standard for web searching for most of the planet for the last 7 years. This was followed by a panel discussion which included a founder member of OddPost, who now power the excellent new AJAX-based Yahoo mail client (currently in Beta). You simply don't get these people anywhere else. I appreciate that for many of the people reading this, I just said "blah blah blah Google! blah blah blah blah"... but it's seriously inspiring to be continuously coming across people and companies that I'd only previously read about. Next week there is a free seminar at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View celebrating 30 years of Public Key Cryptography (calm down now). This is all very well and good, but two of the speakers are Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Dr. Martin Hellman! (I can see you're getting over-excited... take a few deep relaxing breaths before continuing...). These are the guys who discovered (invented?) one of the most fundamental algorithms in modern cryptrographic communication protocols - it's the stuff that keeps your credit card details safe over the Internet. (we'll gloss over the fact that it was actually developed at GCHQ in the UK... Hollywood will probably soon produce a movie that sets the record straight). OK, so this is deeply nerdy stuff. But it's the kind of nerdy stuff that I keep tripping over. It's fantastic.