Behind the scenes of the development of the Danger hiptop
Brian Swetland
After several years of development, the first hiptops were released
in October of 2002 (branded as 'Sidekick' by T-Mobile). Before a final
product ships, prototype hardware has to designed, built, modified
and iterated upon. Software must be written and rewritten. Often,
the final shipping product looks almost nothing like what you were
originally building.
In this talk, Brian will share some of his experiences as a software
engineer building a consumer cellular/data device at a small startup.
He'll describe the product that Danger was building when he started
working at the four-month-old company, share some stories and pictures
of that device, the very different device it evolved into, and various
prototypes along the way. He'll also describe some of the architecture
of the hiptop and share some of the design decisions that were made
while building the virtual machine that supports the bulk of the hiptop
OS and all of the applications.