Cool, cool and cool.
I'm suddenly excited but I'll try to break this down as it happened (and no, you probably won't be nearly as excited).
I just saw that Joel Spolsky's going to be in Santa Clara in March 2006 for EclipseCon. So of course I have to check when the GDC will be next year. I know it's going back to San Jose next year and I've been looking forward to that. Now I see they've just updated the GDC web site with the promise of more info coming soon. To top it off, the EclipseCon runs March 20-23 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and the Game Developers Conference will run March 20-24 in San Jose - I'm guessing it's on Almaden again. So they're about eight miles apart.
I got to meet Joel for lunch with a crowd of other devotes in Toronto early this year. That was a great experience. I didn't have much to say, but I've been following Joel's commentary for a few years now and it's good to get a little face time. Meeting someone who has been successful in my field and has well-founded opinions that he can clearly express is a valuable experience and was well-worth the trip to Toronto. I got to take a break the rest of the weekend and visit with friends and family too. Joel is a prime example of the celebrity of the geek crowd and he's earned his status. I enjoy that he shares his experiences in a way that's very accessible to his readers. I also saw it as a chance to get my feet wet networking with other entrepreneurial-minded developers. It's great to spend some time with people who think like you, and that made for a great time. With any luck, maybe he'll arrange the same kind of get-together in Santa Clara.
Then there's the news happening with GDC.
I submitted a couple ideas for talks this year. That's a big leap for me. I've done a lot of talking, a lot of writing, and a lot of reading over the years and now I really feel like I'm ready to put it together in a way that can help other developers. While most of my game development experience is experimental, I hope to leverage a lot of the knowledge I've built up in other areas and apply it to the massive application area that is gaming. Really, the talks that I proposed are an extension of the work and research that I've been doing on my own and some of that can be seen already in what I've written here in my blog. I think that a rational, solid background in software theory always helps build better games. Very often it looks like people jump in to game development because they're excited about it, but then they take unnecessary shortcuts that limit the growth potential of the great stuff they're building. Anyhow, if I can present at GDC, you can hear and see some of that at the conference. I think that my insight and background can be valuable to a lot of people that see nothing but the same game code day in and day out. If I can't, I'm still going to go the same route, but it'll just grow a little more slowly.
So where does EclipseCon come in? Well, with the cost of a pass, it's unlikely I'll get to go to the parts I'd like to see. Joel is a great speaker, but they're also going to have Erich Gamma, one of the so-called Gang of Four that wrote a little piece called Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. This was recommended for a class I took a couple years ago, and damn I'm glad I got it. Eclipse is fun, and I'd like to get to the convention, but it'll have to work around my prior commitment to the GDC. I'll have to see how it works out. Last year Jeff and I tried to make it to the Embedded Systems Conference at the same time as the GDC and, even though we got all signed up in time, we totally blew scheduling it.
So yeah, I'm excited again. Just this morning I was California dreaming. I think it's the time of year. Even though autumn looks nicer around here, I've been away from the palm trees and the Cali attitude for too long. I know my opinion is coloured by the fact that I only ever go there by choice, whereas being home has the full range of real life, but that doesn't stop me dreaming. The photo I'm using in my blog header right now is of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. I took it last year leaving GDC one evening. It was great to spend some time in San Francisco, Muir Wood and head down to San Jose to see Scott's new digs. I feel really at home in San Jose and I can't wait to get back there again in March.
