Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – What it Takes to Become an iPhone Developer

Abstract:

Since the opening of the iPhone app store, many developers have turned themselves into true success stories. While these stories are more exception than rule, their telling has inspired countless others to give iPhone development a shot. The app store is a revolution in software distribution, and it gives independent developers the power to make their own success. If you are considering becoming an iPhone developer, or if you are just curious what it’s all about, this session is for you. You will learn how to get the SDK, how to join the iPhone developer program and some common iPhone business models. We will also look at the technical side of iPhone development and get a look at the tools of the SDK. Since this session falls on the day of the release of iPhone OS 3.0, we will also get a good look at the new features in the OS and SDK that enable even more rapid development and new business models.

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Kiplinger went so far as to dub Houston the #1 city in the U.S.:

It’s the city of big plans and no rules, beat-the-heat tunnels and loop-the-loop highways, world-class museums and wiry cowboys, humidity that demands an ice-cold martini and the biggest damn liquor store on the planet. How could you not love Houston?

Now, Newsweek is getting into the game:

Houston has become a sort of Silicon Valley for the global energy industry. Urban cowboy? Think suburban geek.

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In May, the unemployment rate in the nation’s sixth largest metropolitan area was a measly 3.8 percent. In the past year, Houston-based companies, which include 26 Fortune 500 firms, added 71,000 jobs to their payrolls. The local United Way closed out its fiscal year with a record $76.1 million in donations. At the Galleria, a high-end shopping oasis, Bridgette Bottone, manager of the De Beers store, notes, “We’re still selling the big guys”: three-carat-plus diamonds that retail for more than $50,000.

The jobs are here, but getting people here to fill them has become a real problem. According to this article in last week’s Houston Chronicle, Houston employers are having a tough time dealing with the poor housing markets in other cities:

Since about January, good candidates from the Midwest and beyond have been saying: “I’d love to come to Houston, but there is no way I can sell my house,” said Hackett.

The opposite is also true:

Some companies are facing the opposite problem: They can’t get homeowners to leave Houston. Jamie Belinne, assistant dean of career services at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, said one high-tech recruiter recently complained that he’s having trouble talking the newly minted graduates into moving to California.

With all of this growth, one would expect the traffic congestion in the city to be unbearable, but that is not the case. Houston’s freeway and public transportation system is modern and continuously updated. The latest additions to the Katy Freeway are quite impressive. Planning expert Randal O’Toole recently wrote about Houston after visiting for the PAD conference:

Fourth, although Houston has plenty of congestion, it has done more to relieve that congestion than almost any other urban area in America. Between 1982 and 2005, Houston increased its freeway lane miles by almost 80 percent and its arterial lane miles by 66 percent. The average U.S. urban area, and in particular regions such as Los Angeles and Portland, only grew their highway networks by about half that much.

I’m happy to see Houston receiving the attention it deserves as a major global city. I hope to hear and write more about how great it is here over the second half of this year.

(Hat tip to Richard for getting to this first.)

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Who knew that a developer in Houston had more than twice the buying power of developers in San Francisco.

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Well, I didn’t know, but I’m far from surprised. Houston is a serious bargain for anyone who wants all the amenities of a major US city for around half of the cost. The city boasts top notch cuisine, opera, regional theatre, symphony, sports, rodeo, and parks, and that’s just the stuff that I care about .

Houston also has a large, thriving developer community supported heavily by the financial, biomedical, and energy industries. The Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, and Agile Development user groups each consistently draw at least 20 members to almost every meeting. That’s not bad for a city that spans more than 600 square miles.

Houston also has a burgeoning tech start up community powered by its favorable business climate. It’s not a stretch to say that a $100,000 investment in a company in the Valley will probably burn out in about half of the time as the same investment in a startup headquartered in Houston.

There is no scarcity of programming talent in Houston, either. With Rice University and the University of Houston in the city limits and Texas A&M University a mere 90 miles away, the market gets pumped full of eager developers at the end of every semester. As for experienced developers, who do you think has been powering the space program and the energy industry all of these years?

It’s no secret that I love Houston, and, yeah, I’m a bit of a cheerleader, but I hear a lot of negative things about Houston from people around the country. Most of that negativity is baseless, and it comes from people who have visited Houston only briefly or not at all. Try spending a couple of weeks here, and I’m sure you can find something about the city that you love. So, if you’re a developer, and you want to live and work in a big city, hop a flight to Houston (you can get here non-stop from pretty much anywhere in the US). There are a lot of software companies here, and I’m sure one of them would love to have you.

[via blogHouston]