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!

Do you like your Sphero? How about getting one that is 2500x larger than the current Sphero? That’s the new Sphero product – Peacekeeper. Order it today on Indiegogo. Along with some other cool Sphero stuff.

My close friend Jerry Colonna is giving an extraordinary seminar in Boulder on 4/19 with Parker Palmer called Surviving the Startup Life: The Toll of Merging Identity and Work. Jerry is the best CEO coach I know, a dear friend, and one of the best investors I ever have gotten to work with (we did a lot together in the 1990s when Jerry was partners with Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners.)

I’m psyched to see Xconomy launch their Boulder/Denver edition. Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s CEO, talks about how it came together in his post Announcing Xconomy Boulder/Denver—7th Region in Our Network. Boulder/Denver joins the other six regions – Boston, Detroit, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle – and is now part of the broad and expanding coverage that Xconomy is providing on business, life sciences, and technology news. I’m especially glad that Xconomy hired Michael Davidson as the Boulder/Denver editor. I’ve known Michael for a number of years and have always found his writing and reporting to be insightful, detailed, and thorough. Of all the local tech writers, I think he’s the best and I’m glad he’s leading the charge here for Xconomy.

Our Foundry Group CEO list lit up this morning with a question about CEO coaches and whether they were helpful. My quick response was: I think a great CEO coach can be awesome and not-great CEO coach can be very detrimental. Jerry Colonna is the best CEO coach I’ve ever met or worked with. There are others that I’m sure will emerge from this discussion but make sure you know what you are getting / looking for.

Amy and I are going to be hanging out at the Boulder Book Store on the Pearl Street Mall on Friday from 4:15pm to 6:00pm. We’ll be signing copies of Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur and talking with anyone who shows up about the challenges and joys of a startup life.

One of the places new approaches to human-computer interaction plays out is with video games. One company – Harmonix – has been working on this for 18 years. Harmonix, which is best known for Rock Band, is also the developer of three massive video game franchises. The first, Guitar Hero, was the result of almost a decade of experimentation that resulted in the first enormous hit in the music genre in the US. Virtually everyone I know remembers the first time they picked up a plastic guitar and played their first licks on Guitar Hero. Two years later, Rock Band followed, taking the music genre up to a new level, and being a magnificent example of a game that suddenly absorbed everyone in the room into it. Their more recent hit, Dance Central, demonstrated how powerfully absorbing a human-based interface could be, especially when combined with music, and is the top-selling dance game franchise for the Microsoft Kinect.

I’m not religious but I’ve always liked the idea of the Sabbath. One day a week of rest and reflection. I spent the weekend with Amy in San Diego and in addition to a Digital Sabbath (no electronic devices from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown) I took off all day Sunday off from electronic devices, only opening up my laptop on Sunday night to start editing the latest draft of Matt Blumberg’s book Startup CEO.

I woke up to an email today from Aaron Schwartz, founder of Modify. I don’t know Aaron other than our email exchanges but he thanked me for Venture Deals which he said has been very helpful to him. His note went on to say: *A close friend of mine, and one of my best friend’s co-founders just passed away after a 15-month battle with non-smoker’s lung cancer. I thought the below article was incredibly revealing about how meaningful a partner and leader can be for a start-up. If you think it would be useful to other entrepreneurs, I hope you’ll take a moment and share it. *