RSS

Joel Spolsky to Keynote at ZendCon ’07

August 1, 2007

Events

p. I’m excited to announce that Joel Spolsky, author, CEO, and “blogger extraordinaire”:http://joelonsoftware.com has consented to be one of the keynote speakers at “ZendCon ’07″:http://zendcon.com.

p. Many of you probably already know who Joel is. If not, he’s the author of several great books including Joel on Software and his latest title Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent, both put out by my buddies over at “apress”:http://apress.com/.

p. I’m excited because Joel will bring a new perspective to the conference. Joel is not a PHP developer but he knows a lot about hiring good developers and building good software. It’s the latter of the two that he will be talking about at ZendCon. Here’s the description of his talk.

bq. Too many times you see teams create very decent products that, for whatever reason, fail to rise above the crowd and truly capture the popular imagination. They are surprised when their products are mostly ignored by the marketplace, which seems to be captivated by some other shiny geegaw that’s functionally inferior and more expensive.

In many product categories, from software to consumer electronics, the product with the most market share is often more expensive and less functional than the number two product. I will explore why this happens and suggest some ways to design a blue chip product that people will love. After you get great software and products using the usual repertoire of debugging, usability testing, etc., you have to go still further and think about beauty, user happiness, and emotional impact.

p. So make sure you register, ZendCon is going to be bigger and better than ever this year.

*(disc) “ZendCon Homepage”:http://www.zendcon.com
* “ZendCon Wiki”:http://www.zendcon.com/wiki/
* “ZendCon on FaceBook”:http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2498136530
* “ZendCon on Upcoming”:http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/202767/

About Cal Evans

Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal touched his first computer. (We're using the term "computer" loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PC's. For the past 10 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows. He has built on a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of "management by wandering around". Cal is currently based in Nashville, TN and is gainfully unemployed as the Chief Marketing Officer of Blue Parabola, LLC. Cal is happily married to wife 1.28, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 kids who were both bright enough not to pursue a career in IT. Cal blogs at http://blog.calevans.com and is the founder and host of Day Camp 4 Developers

View all posts by Cal Evans →

One Response to “Joel Spolsky to Keynote at ZendCon ’07”

  1. caseydk Says:
    August 1, 2007 at 6:43 pm

    I caught one of his keynotes when I presented at the Better Software Conference last year. He gives a pretty entertaining and engaging presentation.