Web E^xponents

May 4, 2009 11:14 pm | 3 Comments

I’m fortunate to have gotten to know so many tech gurus over the last few years from speaking at conferences and co-chairing Velocity. As if programming wasn’t complex enough, there are all the choices that have to be made with regard to language, design, performance, scalability, tools, deployment, and more. It’s incredibly valuable to hear what these experts have to say. I always come away with new insights and ideas.

I wanted to find a way that my fellow Googlers and the web development community at large could share in this benefit, as well. A few months ago I started inviting these industry leaders to give tech talks at Google. This has gone very well. The talks are popular, and there’s an even bigger benefit from posting the videos and slides afterward.

I decided to give this speaker series a name: Web E^xponents where “exponent” is someone who “actively supports or favors a cause”. There’s a great tagline, too: “raising web technology to a higher power”. I blogged about this on the Google Code Blog:

• Web E^xponents – announcing the speaker series
• John Resig – Drop-in JavaScript Performance
• Doug Crockford – JavaScript: The Good Parts
• me – Life’s Too Short, Write Fast Code (part 2)
• PPK – The Open Web Goes Mobile

All the videos are available in the Web Exponents playlist on YouTube. This week I’ll be blogging about Rob Campbell’s talk on Firebug. You can subscribe to the playlist to make sure you catch his and all future videos from these Web E^xponents.