Here at the Surge Conference in Baltimore, Md. I stumbled upon this Apple booth on the trade show floor. Sure, many of the developers and operations engineers attending the conference toted MacBooks of some sort, but Apple doesn’t show up at trade shows pitching its wares anymore. No, the guy was here recruiting for engineers to help with Apple’s iCloud product, which has had struggles that seem odd for a company that spends as much effort on the user experience as Apple.
The Surge Conference is billed as a conference about scalability, and is one of the cooler and nerdier events on the East Coast for those trying to build big websites and services. The premise of the conference is to get engineers onstage talking about times they have failed and what they learned from it. Engineers from Facebook, Pinterest and Yammer are giving talks. So it attracts a cluster of engineers that Apple would love to have working on its own cloud services, which have so far struggled to scale to the hundred of millions of dedicated users the company has.
