Enterprise development is once again white hot. More evidence is this year’s Gluecon. Not only does Gluecon have the usual raft of amazing startup/early stage sponsors, but this year, the “big guys” are showing up (SAP, Intel, HP, Google, IBM, General Motors, Rackspace). And, I also know (because Eric’s told me) that we’re seeing a leap in the number of enterprise developers that are registering for the show.

Is it cloud computing adoption that’s driving this? Or mobile? or Big Data, or APIs? I’m not sure if it’s one topically-driven thing, but it sure does seem like the little developer conference that we helped to start just over five years ago is turning into *the* place to be if you’re looking for technical content.

The most recent agenda is here. Click on the link and you’ll see loads of juicy, technical content. I don’t know of anywhere you can go to get this depth of content.

So, I hope to see you at Gluecon (in just under 3 weeks). I’ll be there  - absorbing everything that I can along with the rest of you. Use “gluespring” to take 10% off of the registration price.

As we enter the 5th year of Gluecon, I’m very excited to see it come together. Eric Norlin has been saying year after year that his goal is to make Gluecon “the most technical, developer-focused conference” out there and I love watching him try.

You can check out the most recent agenda here, but some of the sessions that are indicative of what Eric’s talking about include:

• Building a distributed data platform with Node.js, Storm, Kafka, and ZeroMQ
• An Enterprise Mobile Reference Architecture
• Building using Netflix’s Open Source Architecture (a 4 hour workshop)
• Using Swagger to Build a Great API Interface
• The Pros and Cons of Choosing Go
• Availability During Cloud Outages: Multi-Regional, Self-Healing MySQL
• Node.js is for APIs

Beyond the content, I can personally testify that you’ll find an amazing group of people to hang out with, a truly welcoming atmosphere, and the best conference wifi you’ll find anywhere. Plus, it’s in Boulder at the beginning of summer!

Be sure to grab the early bird price (which ends April 7th) while you can — and use “brad12″ to take an additional 10% off.

We’ve been investing in our Glue theme and Protocol theme for a long time – well before we started Foundry Group. Many of our Glue investments and our Protocol investments are growing quickly and becoming integral parts of the Internet and web software infrastructure.

It made me smile to see a recent post from Promoboxx titled We’re Powered by TechStars Companies. It’s a great post about focusing on what matters for your product while leveraging great technology infrastructure from other companies. Several of the companies we are investors in are mentioned, including SendGrid and FullContact, each which are TechStars companies that we invested in after they finished the program.

For as long as I’ve been involved in writing and creating software there has always been a deep philosophy of creating building blocks that you can leverage. Something magical happened around this with the web and in the past five or so years there have been a number of amazing companies created that are easy to quickly integrate, either through a little bit of code or an API. It’s part of thing that has changed the dynamics of creating and launching a web software company, dramatically lowering the price of just getting something out there so you can start getting real feedback from users and customers.

When I reflect on this year’s Glue Conference, it feels like we’ve finally reached a tipping point where this concept is ubiquitous. I expect we’ll talk about it at Defrag and Eric Norlin’s post from yesterday titled The 20 Year Cycle hints to some of the deeper ideas about how this affects enterprise software and corporate IT, in addition to all the obvious consumer implications.

It’s a great time to be building software – the innovation curve is speeding up, not slowing down, and I expect when we look back 20 years from now we won’t recognize what we were doing in 2012.

Man does Eric Norlin know how to put on a conference. And, as a bonus, he’s got an awesome soundtrack and mindblowing trailer for the Glue Conference that Fake Grimlock would love.

Here’s a taste of what’s saturating my brain.

• Shit My Cloud Evangelist Says, Just Not to the CSO by Chris Hoff, Juniper Networks
• Foragers, Farmers, Forks & Forgers: On Software, Patronage and Craft Brewing by James Governor, Redmonk
• Using APIs and Infrastructure by John Musser, Programmable Web
• NoSQL Smackdown: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J by Tim Berglund
• The Badass Beyond Hadoop: Percolator, Dremmel, Pregel by Mike Miller, Clouant

And then it was lunchtime. Breath deeply.

Gluecon is now slightly less than a month away, and if you’re not going, you should. Gluecon is a phenomenal gathering of developers working in the big data, mobile, and cloud computing arenas (where the topic of the API comes up continually). Yet, Gluecon is not “expo-big,” so you’ll be able to actually interact with everyone there, and not feel like you’re drowning in a sea of people amidst a concrete hall full of vendor booths.

The sessions that are assembled for Gluecon are done the right way — namely, there are no panels (zero), and they’re technically deep. Sessions like:

“The Badass Beyond Hadoop: Percolator, Dremmel, Pregel”
“Why MongoDB + Node.js is the new server-side stack”
“Architecting for Performance in the face of Mobile and APIs”
“Building the best mobile libraries to consume all kinds of backend APIs”
“Scaling Mobile Services on Diverse Networks”
“Big Pipes: Architecting for High-Volume Realtime Social Data”
“Securing Your Pocket to The Cloud: OAuth and Mobile Devices”
“Model-Driven Deployment: The Best Practice Successor to Virtual Appliances”

Beyond the sessions, there are three, 4 hour long workshops being presented. They cover:

“Constructing Cloud Architecture the Netflix Way”
“Developing polyglot applications on Cloud Foundry”
“Inside the DevOps PaaS Toolshed”

And there’s a hackathon. And there’s a CloudCamp.

No matter where you live (east coast or west coast or anywhere in between), you should get to Gluecon. And if you’re a developer that lives in Colorado, it’s an absolute must.

Use “brad12″ to take 10% off of your gluecon registration. See you there!