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Wednesday, September 24, 2008
ReMix UK - Day two
Following on from my Day 1 review of yesterday... Day 2 started with more of the same, another day packed full of talks - 5 sessions this time.
Internationalizing WPF and Silverlight Applications - Guy Smith-Ferrier
I've seen Guy speak before, and know him to be an engaging and enthusiastic speaker. I think he had probably one of the most difficult timeslots - first thing Friday morning, when judging by the tweets coming through the geek dinner had been quite alcohol friendly - and so there weren't a huge amount of people present. I own a copy of Guy's .Net Internationalization book and so was ready to learn more. I aren't in a position to need to internationalize WPF or Silverlight at the moment, but am working with a team who are doing it for .Net and so I thought I'd go and see what recommendations he had, and what I could learn to take back and apply to .Net.
One of the interesting takeaways was with regards to the subtle difference between CurrentUICulture and CurrentCulture. CurrentUICulture is about language, CurrentCulture is about date format, currency etc. I've since found an interesting post which explains in much greater detail than I noted down at the time.
One potential gotcha: when manipulating the CurrentUICulture in a multi-threaded environment, you need to set it on each thread - I know that this will come back to haunt me if I don't make a note somewhere :-)
Guy also introduced the concept of post-build localization - i.e. shipping the assemblies to a specialist team who are language specialists. There is a tool locBaml (which is not production ready, but which is used by Microsoft internally) which can be used to help manage this process. There seemed to be quite a few steps to the process involving msbuild, updating the csproj file and generating csv files.
Another takeaway point pertained to the inheritance of resources - if you're localizing an application into English and Dutch then there probably isn't much overlap in content, maybe except for Ok and a few similar words. If however you're localizing an application into English and American English then the majority of the words will be the same with the exception of colour/color, theatre/theater etc. It is easy to see that in a true multi-language environment having to define each resource for each language, even if they're the same content, will have an overhead in storage. So, he mentioned the concept of resource fallback - if the application can't find an exact match for a resource in a specific culture then it would fallback to the resource that most closely matches the users request. The post build tool locBaml doesn't have this inheritance and so would result in full storage of all words.
A brief mention was made about Silverlight 2 and internationalization - there is no flow direction support at the moment, so you can't switch right-to-left, up-to-down etc.
ASP.NET Front End Performance - Chris Hay
Another talk mentioning Fiddler as a great tool - but with a disclaimer - it doesn't work against localhost, but does against the machine name.
The first part of Chris's talk focussed on reducing the number of requests being made. He used Firebug and IBM Page Detailer to show the results in Firefox and IE respectively.
Some of his takeaways were:
A useful session with some food for thought.
No Silverlight App is an Island (of Richness) - Mike Taulty
Having seen Mike talk not long ago at a Brighton VBUG I had high expectations, and I wasn't disappointed.
This talk got into what you can and can't do to interact with HTML, javascript, the machine, HTTP, SOAP etc and was entertaining and thought-provoking.
One potential gotcha is that you can't make cross-scheme requests, i.e. HTTP to HTTPS or vice versa - another thing I'm noting down in case I ever stumble across such an issue.
Mike has blogged and provided sample code from his session here.
Robots and Beyond - See what you can do today - Paul Foster
I didn't know anything about the Microsoft Robotics Development Studio before this talk so was interested to find out about what it is (a pictorial drag and drop way to control robots), and what it can offer (a virtual environment to play with virtual robots - which reduces the barrier to entry rather). I was quite intrigued by the idea of the iRobot Roomba - a robot vacuum cleaner - shame it doesn't do stairs...
A good talk, but then again with a robot demo it would be hard for it not be captivating to some extent :-)
20/20 Talks - Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and more
A great final session - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 speakers. I tried to note down who talked about what:
The day ended with a Sneak Peeks session, showing new ideas, projects and potential products but the numbers were quite well down by this point. I quite liked the Family Archive device - a scanner, an interactive table (a bit like surface) - but there was a lot of advertising going on which was a bit of a sad way to close and otherwise good conference.
Internationalizing WPF and Silverlight Applications - Guy Smith-Ferrier
I've seen Guy speak before, and know him to be an engaging and enthusiastic speaker. I think he had probably one of the most difficult timeslots - first thing Friday morning, when judging by the tweets coming through the geek dinner had been quite alcohol friendly - and so there weren't a huge amount of people present. I own a copy of Guy's .Net Internationalization book and so was ready to learn more. I aren't in a position to need to internationalize WPF or Silverlight at the moment, but am working with a team who are doing it for .Net and so I thought I'd go and see what recommendations he had, and what I could learn to take back and apply to .Net.
One of the interesting takeaways was with regards to the subtle difference between CurrentUICulture and CurrentCulture. CurrentUICulture is about language, CurrentCulture is about date format, currency etc. I've since found an interesting post which explains in much greater detail than I noted down at the time.
One potential gotcha: when manipulating the CurrentUICulture in a multi-threaded environment, you need to set it on each thread - I know that this will come back to haunt me if I don't make a note somewhere :-)
Guy also introduced the concept of post-build localization - i.e. shipping the assemblies to a specialist team who are language specialists. There is a tool locBaml (which is not production ready, but which is used by Microsoft internally) which can be used to help manage this process. There seemed to be quite a few steps to the process involving msbuild, updating the csproj file and generating csv files.
Another takeaway point pertained to the inheritance of resources - if you're localizing an application into English and Dutch then there probably isn't much overlap in content, maybe except for Ok and a few similar words. If however you're localizing an application into English and American English then the majority of the words will be the same with the exception of colour/color, theatre/theater etc. It is easy to see that in a true multi-language environment having to define each resource for each language, even if they're the same content, will have an overhead in storage. So, he mentioned the concept of resource fallback - if the application can't find an exact match for a resource in a specific culture then it would fallback to the resource that most closely matches the users request. The post build tool locBaml doesn't have this inheritance and so would result in full storage of all words.
A brief mention was made about Silverlight 2 and internationalization - there is no flow direction support at the moment, so you can't switch right-to-left, up-to-down etc.
ASP.NET Front End Performance - Chris Hay
Another talk mentioning Fiddler as a great tool - but with a disclaimer - it doesn't work against localhost, but does against the machine name.
The first part of Chris's talk focussed on reducing the number of requests being made. He used Firebug and IBM Page Detailer to show the results in Firefox and IE respectively.
Some of his takeaways were:
- Combine css files into one file to cut down the number of file requests being made
- Combine js files into one file to cut down the number of file request being made
- Make use of file compression - but be careful about what you compress - PDFs don't like being compressed
- If possible use Server.Transfer instead of Response.Redirect as obviously this is done at server not client side saving a round-trip
A useful session with some food for thought.
No Silverlight App is an Island (of Richness) - Mike Taulty
Having seen Mike talk not long ago at a Brighton VBUG I had high expectations, and I wasn't disappointed.
This talk got into what you can and can't do to interact with HTML, javascript, the machine, HTTP, SOAP etc and was entertaining and thought-provoking.
One potential gotcha is that you can't make cross-scheme requests, i.e. HTTP to HTTPS or vice versa - another thing I'm noting down in case I ever stumble across such an issue.
Mike has blogged and provided sample code from his session here.
Robots and Beyond - See what you can do today - Paul Foster
I didn't know anything about the Microsoft Robotics Development Studio before this talk so was interested to find out about what it is (a pictorial drag and drop way to control robots), and what it can offer (a virtual environment to play with virtual robots - which reduces the barrier to entry rather). I was quite intrigued by the idea of the iRobot Roomba - a robot vacuum cleaner - shame it doesn't do stairs...
A good talk, but then again with a robot demo it would be hard for it not be captivating to some extent :-)
20/20 Talks - Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and more
A great final session - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 speakers. I tried to note down who talked about what:
- David Pugh Jones - Digital advertising
- Sara Ford - 20 vs tool tips - some repetition from Thursday's session but most impressive to have a tool tip demo in 20 seconds
- Richard Costall - Silverlight 20 Sliders - he had an mp3 of his kids counting down to mark end of slides which started off quite cute
- Travis Leithead - IE8 Accelerators and web slices
- Seb Lee-Delisle - Rich digital content although he cheated the format a little by having some flash samples/videos which lasted for 2 or 3 multiples of the allowed 20 seconds but as he said cutting the videos down to 20 seconds was going to be a lot of work
- Dave McMahon - How to do a 20/20 session - based on observations from the previous speakers
The day ended with a Sneak Peeks session, showing new ideas, projects and potential products but the numbers were quite well down by this point. I quite liked the Family Archive device - a scanner, an interactive table (a bit like surface) - but there was a lot of advertising going on which was a bit of a sad way to close and otherwise good conference.
Labels: Brighton, conference, event, remix
// posted by Jane @ 7:35 PM 
Comments:
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
ReMix UK - Day one
So what was ReMix and who was it aimed at? Well, to tell you the truth I'm still wondering that myself. In my opinion it wasn't completely targetting any one audience - there were talks for developers, talks for designers, and some more business related talks too. Madgex were one of the sponsors, and so we had our stand there and had the Remix Bubbler bubbling away nicely - less people contributing than with the dConstruct bubbler, but still a great talking point and having the stand also gave the Madgex attendees somewhere to congregate too.
Day 1 started with the opening keynotes - Bill Buxton spoke first from a design and user experience perspective [Review at The Register]. Then came Scott Guthrie with lots of Silverlight demos (including ITV's Catch up service), some talk about Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (like it comes with support for javascript libraries like prototype and jquery etc) and some talk about IE8.
There were 4 streams to chose from on a combination of themes 'more developer', 'more designer', 'user interaction/business', 'beyond work' and 'everyone'. No room specialised in a single topic - the talks were allocated to rooms roughly based on expected audience. There were 4 sessions on Day 1.
Building Silverlight 2 Applications - Part 1 - Scott Guthrie
I only attended part one of this talk, as it failed to inspire. It was a bit too drag and droppy for me, and didn't show me anything really exciting or code focussed. It also left me wondering about accessibility, and internationalisation (which is why my first session on Friday was Guy's Internationalization of WPF and Silverlight).
Photosynth: Art, Science and More - John Penrose & Joshua Edwards
This was an introduction to a neat looking photographic tool, photosynth. There are 2 parts to this, one is a downloaded tool which allows you to select a set of JPG images and produce a synth, the second is an online space were synths are stored. The online space is pretty limited at the moment - there is no way to hide your synths, and every synth is automatically put up there - so you wouldn't want to use it for sensitive photos. Behind the scenes, the software generates a point cloud to determine the edges of your images, and then uses this cloud to work out how the photos should be slotted together - it skews and stretches the images to fit them together. There are some really impressive looking synths, but I think you need to plan what you're doing. In the wild this is being used on the London Eye site (which, of course following the law of demos, failed to work properly during the demo!).
No colour adjustment or exposure levelling happens in the process, which leads to some dramatic colour differences between the photos used in the synth.
This changes the normal rules for photography - instead of trying to take one killer image, you're deliberately trying to capture the whole image in a series of photos, at different focal lengths, to allow different points of detail. Done well, these give a real feeling of exploration.
This inspired me to head back to the Madgex stand, take a stack of photos of it and synth them - the results can be seen here.
ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project "Astoria") - Mike Flasko
An interesting, well presented session explaining how the restful data services work. We had an overview of the data services and keywords ($top, $skip, $orderby, $filter, $expand), as well as the formats the data can be presented in (JSON, XML, Atom). I'm still not sure what I think of this as a service, but I do like the fact that it makes use of the normal HTTP verbs, and results in standard HTTP outputs (404, 201 etc) and that it is fully secure by default, needing permissions to be explicitly granted.
During this demo the tool fiddler was demonstrated to see and interact with what was going on at the http protocol level, and this tool looks really useful.
Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks - Sara Ford
This was a whistle stop tour of 21 of Sara's tips and tricks for Visual Studio. They were broken down in to Coding (9 tips), Customising (5 tips) and Debugging (7 tips). Of these, the ones I didn't know about were incremental search, box selection, clipboard ring (I've often ended up with a blank line in my buffer), tracepoints and removing unused usings
As day 1 drew to a close, Bruce did a presentation on oAuth for "Ready Steady Talk" (but failed to get through to the final). I managed a beer at the Brighton Centre before seeking food (and more beer) at The Hop Poles with other Madgexians.
Day 1 started with the opening keynotes - Bill Buxton spoke first from a design and user experience perspective [Review at The Register]. Then came Scott Guthrie with lots of Silverlight demos (including ITV's Catch up service), some talk about Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (like it comes with support for javascript libraries like prototype and jquery etc) and some talk about IE8.
There were 4 streams to chose from on a combination of themes 'more developer', 'more designer', 'user interaction/business', 'beyond work' and 'everyone'. No room specialised in a single topic - the talks were allocated to rooms roughly based on expected audience. There were 4 sessions on Day 1.
Building Silverlight 2 Applications - Part 1 - Scott Guthrie
I only attended part one of this talk, as it failed to inspire. It was a bit too drag and droppy for me, and didn't show me anything really exciting or code focussed. It also left me wondering about accessibility, and internationalisation (which is why my first session on Friday was Guy's Internationalization of WPF and Silverlight).
Photosynth: Art, Science and More - John Penrose & Joshua Edwards
This was an introduction to a neat looking photographic tool, photosynth. There are 2 parts to this, one is a downloaded tool which allows you to select a set of JPG images and produce a synth, the second is an online space were synths are stored. The online space is pretty limited at the moment - there is no way to hide your synths, and every synth is automatically put up there - so you wouldn't want to use it for sensitive photos. Behind the scenes, the software generates a point cloud to determine the edges of your images, and then uses this cloud to work out how the photos should be slotted together - it skews and stretches the images to fit them together. There are some really impressive looking synths, but I think you need to plan what you're doing. In the wild this is being used on the London Eye site (which, of course following the law of demos, failed to work properly during the demo!).
No colour adjustment or exposure levelling happens in the process, which leads to some dramatic colour differences between the photos used in the synth.
This changes the normal rules for photography - instead of trying to take one killer image, you're deliberately trying to capture the whole image in a series of photos, at different focal lengths, to allow different points of detail. Done well, these give a real feeling of exploration.
This inspired me to head back to the Madgex stand, take a stack of photos of it and synth them - the results can be seen here.
ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project "Astoria") - Mike Flasko
An interesting, well presented session explaining how the restful data services work. We had an overview of the data services and keywords ($top, $skip, $orderby, $filter, $expand), as well as the formats the data can be presented in (JSON, XML, Atom). I'm still not sure what I think of this as a service, but I do like the fact that it makes use of the normal HTTP verbs, and results in standard HTTP outputs (404, 201 etc) and that it is fully secure by default, needing permissions to be explicitly granted.
During this demo the tool fiddler was demonstrated to see and interact with what was going on at the http protocol level, and this tool looks really useful.
Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks - Sara Ford
This was a whistle stop tour of 21 of Sara's tips and tricks for Visual Studio. They were broken down in to Coding (9 tips), Customising (5 tips) and Debugging (7 tips). Of these, the ones I didn't know about were incremental search, box selection, clipboard ring (I've often ended up with a blank line in my buffer), tracepoints and removing unused usings
As day 1 drew to a close, Bruce did a presentation on oAuth for "Ready Steady Talk" (but failed to get through to the final). I managed a beer at the Brighton Centre before seeking food (and more beer) at The Hop Poles with other Madgexians.
Labels: Brighton, conference, event, remix
// posted by Jane @ 7:51 PM
Comments:
Thursday, October 25, 2007
DDD6
DDD6 will be held at the Microsoft Campus on the 24th November, and it's full already although apparently they're still accepting waitlist registrations.
This will be my first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day, but if WebDD and SQLBits are anything to go by I'll learn lots and be inspired.
This will be my first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day, but if WebDD and SQLBits are anything to go by I'll learn lots and be inspired.
Labels: conference, DDD6, event
// posted by Jane @ 9:35 PM
Comments:
Saturday, October 13, 2007
SQLBits Podcast
The interview that Jim and I recorded with Craig Murphy is now up on his site.
The photo I took of Craig was truly awful and so didn't make it into the public domain. Sorry Craig!
The photo I took of Craig was truly awful and so didn't make it into the public domain. Sorry Craig!
Labels: conference, event, interview, SQL, SQLServer, SQLServer2005
// posted by Jane @ 11:14 PM
Comments:
Monday, October 08, 2007
SQLBits conference
On Saturday I attended the SQLBits conference held at Microsoft Campus in Reading. It was another free conference aimed at SQL Server developers and DBAs and consisting of 4 streams of 5 1-hour-long presentations. I teamed up with Jim, friend and former boss, and headed off to Reading ready for a day of learning.
SQL Server is probably my top skill, I've been working with it since version 7, and have designed databases, developed them, tested them and supported them. So, this conference really had my name written all over it. And it didn't disappoint.
I started off with Transactions and Exception Handling, presented by Eric Allsopp which was an in-depth exploration of the locking mechanics within SQL Server, isolation levels as well as exception handling and the advantages of the SQL Server 2005 BEGIN TRY... BEGIN CATCH syntax over the old @@ERROR syntax. Eric obviously knew his stuff, but I have to admit that following a highly technical (in fact, the most technical session I attended) presentation at 9:30 on a Saturday morning was a bit of a struggle.
Next up we headed to the SQL Server 2008 Beyond Relational presentation by Keith Burns and found out about some the cool new features to be presented in SQL Server 2008 - the most interesting being spatial - using both geography and geometry aspects to allow for manipulation of location based data. A great presentation giving a glance into the new version - not that I've got to grips with SQL Server 2005 yet...
The final presentation of the morning was Simon Sabin with 77 SQL Server Myths (although we only got through about 16 or so). This was a really useful session, challenging some of the beliefs I've held over the years (mainly that were true at one point, but weren't any longer) and making me re-evaluate some of the queries I write.
During lunch there were a couple of talks from sponsors, and some Grok talks going on. I managed to attend neither but did do an interview about the day so far with Craig Murphy.
After lunch we headed to Dave McMahon's talk Daves Top 10 SQL Keywords which was truly excellent. He went through his 10 favourite keywords, and explained, giving examples, why they were in the list, with a final countdown in true Top of the Pops style.
We missed the final session altogether as the 2 sessions we'd identified as being useful had either changed, or after discussion turned out to be not what we expected, so we headed off home. A great day, and really refreshing to have a SQL based day like this. Thanks SQLBits.
SQL Server is probably my top skill, I've been working with it since version 7, and have designed databases, developed them, tested them and supported them. So, this conference really had my name written all over it. And it didn't disappoint.
I started off with Transactions and Exception Handling, presented by Eric Allsopp which was an in-depth exploration of the locking mechanics within SQL Server, isolation levels as well as exception handling and the advantages of the SQL Server 2005 BEGIN TRY... BEGIN CATCH syntax over the old @@ERROR syntax. Eric obviously knew his stuff, but I have to admit that following a highly technical (in fact, the most technical session I attended) presentation at 9:30 on a Saturday morning was a bit of a struggle.
Next up we headed to the SQL Server 2008 Beyond Relational presentation by Keith Burns and found out about some the cool new features to be presented in SQL Server 2008 - the most interesting being spatial - using both geography and geometry aspects to allow for manipulation of location based data. A great presentation giving a glance into the new version - not that I've got to grips with SQL Server 2005 yet...
The final presentation of the morning was Simon Sabin with 77 SQL Server Myths (although we only got through about 16 or so). This was a really useful session, challenging some of the beliefs I've held over the years (mainly that were true at one point, but weren't any longer) and making me re-evaluate some of the queries I write.
During lunch there were a couple of talks from sponsors, and some Grok talks going on. I managed to attend neither but did do an interview about the day so far with Craig Murphy.
After lunch we headed to Dave McMahon's talk Daves Top 10 SQL Keywords which was truly excellent. He went through his 10 favourite keywords, and explained, giving examples, why they were in the list, with a final countdown in true Top of the Pops style.
We missed the final session altogether as the 2 sessions we'd identified as being useful had either changed, or after discussion turned out to be not what we expected, so we headed off home. A great day, and really refreshing to have a SQL based day like this. Thanks SQLBits.
Labels: conference, event, SQL, SQLServer, SQLServer2005
// posted by Jane @ 7:05 PM
Comments:
Conference Schwag bags
I was at the SQLBits conference on Saturday (of which more later) and I started thinking about what makes an ideal conference schwag bag for me:
If you're giving me schwag to spread your name around, then for me, pens, notebooks, post-its and other office based stationery are the items that are likely to make it into the office, and so be seen by my friends and colleagues whilst if you're giving me schwag so that I remember you, and think of you as a thoughtful company, then bottles of water, or biscuits, or fruit are more likely to hit the mark.
- at least one pen
- a notebook
- a bottle of water
If you're giving me schwag to spread your name around, then for me, pens, notebooks, post-its and other office based stationery are the items that are likely to make it into the office, and so be seen by my friends and colleagues whilst if you're giving me schwag so that I remember you, and think of you as a thoughtful company, then bottles of water, or biscuits, or fruit are more likely to hit the mark.
Labels: conference, event, schwag
// posted by Jane @ 8:58 AM
Comments:
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
BarCamp Brighton Day 2
Sunday arrived and having headed home to bed on Saturday evening I strolled into the office at around 9am to see what was happening. The first, and only, issue arose when Ian arrived and informed us that breakfast was half an hour late due to Pret's oven breaking down or something. We pushed the sessions back by 15 minutes and soon caught up again, so no real damage done.
There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)
I managed to see 4 sessions in total:
These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.
After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.
There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)
I managed to see 4 sessions in total:
- Multi Lingual Sites - a discussion - led by Sjors Timmer
- i18n and l10n - Mark Norman Francis
- CSS tips - Vicky Lamburn
- Web testing with Selenium - Kerry Buckley
These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.
After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event
// posted by Jane @ 6:42 PM
Comments:
Saturday, September 08, 2007
BarCamp Brighton Day 1
Ok, so starting off the day with a hangover was inevitable, but not ideal. I got to the office at around 9.30 and started helping out. We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in before the attendees started to arrive, and in fact several arrived early. We hadn't even finishing putting name tags together and so I had to head downstairs armed only with a list (in the order that people registered in) and name badges for those people with first names beginning with A, B or T. I was hugely intimidated opening the door and facing a vast amount of people in the foyer. Still, I got them processed, and it wasn't long before reinforments in the guise of Alex and Gillian appeared to help out. Phew! I obviously wasn't the only one with a hangover as people continue to drift in up until around 2pm, meaning that one of us had to be on the door to let people in and out. At around 2ish, Glenn, Sally and I decided that we'd done enough of this, and that people could phone from now on as the next sets of sessions were about to start.
I managed to attend quite a few sessions during the afternoon and evening, and I have to say I really enjoyed them. The sessions I saw were:
- Social Media - the cats at Nixon McInnes
- Social network portability - James Littlejohn, Tantek Celik, Jeremy Keith and Glenn Jones
- The perfect cup of tea - John Sutherland
- hAvatar - Alper.nl
- How Clearleft work - James Box, Paul Annett and Andy Budd
The food sponsors have been incredibly generous, with lots of pret food for breakfast, a wonderful spread from The Cherry Tree Mediteranean Deli (which Ryan Carson decided to throw away after lunch rather than leave around for people to nibble on - what a waste of truly wonderful food) and loads of pizzas and beer. Not forgetting the generous amounts of fruit, chocolate, crisps and soft drinks too.
I've got a few talks I want to attend tomorrow, especially the Internationalisation and Localisation one - as this is relevant to my last project and a recent blog post so I'm hopeful that I can work my helping out duties around them.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event
// posted by Jane @ 11:30 PM
Comments:
dConstruct 07 Review
Yesterday I attended my first dConstruct conference, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. My day started when I met Nick to put the PCs together for the Madgex stand, and we managed to get ourselves all set up before the doors opened at 9am. Between the 18 strong Madgex crew we manned the stall during all the breaks throughout the day, whilst still managing to attend all the talks - a great balance. We were there mainly for recruitment purposes, and so we'll see in the next few weeks whether that has worked or not.
The conference started with Glenn doing the introductory talks, managing a couple of mentions of Madgex and of course barcampBrighton over the weekend. He handed straight over to Jared Spool who spoke very engagingly about "The dawning of the age of experience". His was the first talk to mention the iPod/iPhone - a theme that proved to be very popular throughout the day. He also mentioned to get chicken sexing into his talk, before ending with a spot of magic.
After a short break, we then heard Peter Merholz on "Experience is the product". He used a lot of real product examples, including tivo, wii and palm pilot - all of which I've had and loved (and despite what he said, Tivo was available in the UK but not for too long, but the service is still running well). He explained how important characterisation of a product is and how important getting the process right was - often designs work from the data first, through the logic and into the user interface, where for a truly successfully product the reverse is more often the case. He said that he wanted to do the talk without mentioned the iPod, but he failed, and used the iPhone as a reference point too.
Next up was "Waterfall bad, Washing Machine good" by Leisa Reichelt which was all about managing products to succeed, and minimising the risks. Her slides were sheer genius - photographs of post it notes. Very innovative, very pleasing. The first part of the talk was a bit dull - rehashing the waterfall methodology and explaining what it was and why it was flawed - something that has been accepted for a long time. The second part became more interesting trying to mesh together agile with user centred design to produce a crossover discipline getting the pros of both methods.
Lunch time next, and a quick trip to my most frequent lunch spot of Pompoko.
The post lunch lull, or graveyard shift, was manned admirably by Cameron Moll, and his talk on "Good vs Great design". He had some really interesting points and was engaging, but my best memory is the brother number 1 shaving hair off the back of brother number 2s head with Mum's razor. One key takeaway for me was the concept of blurring a page layout, and greyscaling it to see what still stands out afterwards. He also recommended the "How Designers Think" book - as a developer do I need to know this, will it just scare me?
Next up was "Building a sense of place" which was an on the couch session with Denise Wilton and George Oates using their experiences of B3ta and Flickr. They chatted around a lot of areas, how the sites started, where they been, where they're heading. Jim blogged the gist of the conversation, so I won't bother rehashing it. I was amazed by the concept of the Faces of Sydney project that George mentioned, and somewhat concerned by the fact that the male face has a hint of David Beckham about it.
After another short break, it was Matt Webb talking about "The Experience Stack". This was my least favourite talk, and in my opinion his A - Z concept prevented a joined up, continuous talk as we jumped from space to space. He also used way too many big words which after so many talks with so much information and so many ideas contending for space in my head just left me a bit dazed.
The final talk of the day was Tom Coates talking about Designing for a web of data. Tom was excellent, and came across as being a really passionate kind of guy. My favourite quote was when he explained twitter as being "Twitter is a way to generate error messages on the web". He explained how important giving services for your data was - 90% of twitter usage is via APIs. He had some great points about designing your product to "play well with others" before starting to talk about fire eagle which looks like it'll be a great service, especially for me with my nice new shiny nokia 6110 navigator.
Then just the wrap up, with the thank yous and the prize draws, and I won the star prize. which I believe to be a copy of CS3 suite. Yay!
After a very rapid deconstructing of our stand and kit, and dropping it all off at the office, we headed to the after party, and proceeded to fail to eat any food, but to manage to drink quite a bit of beer. All in all a great day, with some great speakers and some amazing inspiration. My list of things to follow up on is pretty long!
The conference started with Glenn doing the introductory talks, managing a couple of mentions of Madgex and of course barcampBrighton over the weekend. He handed straight over to Jared Spool who spoke very engagingly about "The dawning of the age of experience". His was the first talk to mention the iPod/iPhone - a theme that proved to be very popular throughout the day. He also mentioned to get chicken sexing into his talk, before ending with a spot of magic.
After a short break, we then heard Peter Merholz on "Experience is the product". He used a lot of real product examples, including tivo, wii and palm pilot - all of which I've had and loved (and despite what he said, Tivo was available in the UK but not for too long, but the service is still running well). He explained how important characterisation of a product is and how important getting the process right was - often designs work from the data first, through the logic and into the user interface, where for a truly successfully product the reverse is more often the case. He said that he wanted to do the talk without mentioned the iPod, but he failed, and used the iPhone as a reference point too.
Next up was "Waterfall bad, Washing Machine good" by Leisa Reichelt which was all about managing products to succeed, and minimising the risks. Her slides were sheer genius - photographs of post it notes. Very innovative, very pleasing. The first part of the talk was a bit dull - rehashing the waterfall methodology and explaining what it was and why it was flawed - something that has been accepted for a long time. The second part became more interesting trying to mesh together agile with user centred design to produce a crossover discipline getting the pros of both methods.
Lunch time next, and a quick trip to my most frequent lunch spot of Pompoko.
The post lunch lull, or graveyard shift, was manned admirably by Cameron Moll, and his talk on "Good vs Great design". He had some really interesting points and was engaging, but my best memory is the brother number 1 shaving hair off the back of brother number 2s head with Mum's razor. One key takeaway for me was the concept of blurring a page layout, and greyscaling it to see what still stands out afterwards. He also recommended the "How Designers Think" book - as a developer do I need to know this, will it just scare me?
Next up was "Building a sense of place" which was an on the couch session with Denise Wilton and George Oates using their experiences of B3ta and Flickr. They chatted around a lot of areas, how the sites started, where they been, where they're heading. Jim blogged the gist of the conversation, so I won't bother rehashing it. I was amazed by the concept of the Faces of Sydney project that George mentioned, and somewhat concerned by the fact that the male face has a hint of David Beckham about it.
After another short break, it was Matt Webb talking about "The Experience Stack". This was my least favourite talk, and in my opinion his A - Z concept prevented a joined up, continuous talk as we jumped from space to space. He also used way too many big words which after so many talks with so much information and so many ideas contending for space in my head just left me a bit dazed.
The final talk of the day was Tom Coates talking about Designing for a web of data. Tom was excellent, and came across as being a really passionate kind of guy. My favourite quote was when he explained twitter as being "Twitter is a way to generate error messages on the web". He explained how important giving services for your data was - 90% of twitter usage is via APIs. He had some great points about designing your product to "play well with others" before starting to talk about fire eagle which looks like it'll be a great service, especially for me with my nice new shiny nokia 6110 navigator.
Then just the wrap up, with the thank yous and the prize draws, and I won the star prize. which I believe to be a copy of CS3 suite. Yay!
After a very rapid deconstructing of our stand and kit, and dropping it all off at the office, we headed to the after party, and proceeded to fail to eat any food, but to manage to drink quite a bit of beer. All in all a great day, with some great speakers and some amazing inspiration. My list of things to follow up on is pretty long!
Labels: Brighton, conference, dConstruct, dConstruct07, event
// posted by Jane @ 10:09 PM
Comments:
Saturday, February 03, 2007
WebDD Overview
I had a great day at WebDD today and attended some good sessions - which I'll go into more later. The Scott Guthrie sessions were hugely over-subscribed, but were recorded so I hope to get a chance to see them at a later stage. Initally not a lot of swag, but I got to leave with a copy of Expression Web as well as a pen and some magazines.
The sessions I attended today were:
And so there ends my first ever conference, I'm not sure why but I've never managed to attend one before. I'm definitely hoping to attend the next WebDD event, and also probably the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! events too.
The sessions I attended today were:
- Expression Web - an excellent introduction to a tool which looks great
- Doing it in style: creating beautiful sites, the web standards way - a bit too much content for the hour, so I'm hoping to see the slides to review the bits that were skipped over
- Quick and dirty Usability tests - one week, no budget, and no usability facility - an interesting overview of usability testing - something I've never experienced
- Ruby On Rails for .NET Developers - excellent presentation, great looking tool and framework
- Unobtrusive Javascript with Rails - graceful degradation of javascript
And so there ends my first ever conference, I'm not sure why but I've never managed to attend one before. I'm definitely hoping to attend the next WebDD event, and also probably the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! events too.
Labels: conference, Development, WebDD
// posted by Jane @ 9:37 PM
Comments:
