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p>If you missed it,

The crowd were poised.

Scott Berkun

The Myths of Innovation - Scott opened with a cracker... he talked a lot about innovation history, and how the stories of innovation are glamorized and misconceived. He said moments of pure innovation are often a myth and that great moments in history labeled as an innovation are actually the result of years of problem solving. I can't all the fine details, but what I got from the talk in relation to the web is that in order to make a successful web app or product you must be solving a problem, you can't just make something because it's cool. Innovation will come from creating a solution to a real problem.

Plug

• The Double Helix - A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

George Oates

User Experience in Online Communities - George's talk was another favorite of mine. The basis of her talk stemmed from her experience in building and managing Flickr, which gives her a certain amount of authority. She opened the talk with a reference to Shared Space, a Europeon traffic project aimed at changing the design of busy streets to allow people with different modes of transport to use the same space, in harmony, much like the very nature of the web. She plugged a book called Abstracting Craft by Malcolm McCullough... looks interesting.

She went on to tell a tale of the beginnings of Flickr and how they didn't really start with Flickr as we know it, but more in the shape of a game they called Game Never Ending. I wonder what the .gne file extension Flickr's URLs stands for? :) But as it happened the game wasn't going to be enough to make them a profitable company so they went on to create a photo sharing application, which I believe the was one of the components of the original game. Also interesting is that the original Flickr team consisted of 5 people. Such a small team meant they had to wear many hats throughout the creation of Flickr, but it also meant they could make decisions faster.

Some extra tidbits I got from the talk... Experiment, everyone will appreciate experimentation, it opens the gates to new ideas and possibilities. Eventually it will all come together. One of the interface and information architecture design decisions behind Flickr was to create less suggestion for rules and interaction which makes the application more open and interpretive.

Ben Winter Giles

Managing agile projects - Ok, I admit. Rob and I didn't really get into this talk. We even left the room at one stage to check out the other talks, which resulted in us returning because the other talks weren't much chop either. From what I did take in, it sounded very similar to most Agile Development articles I've read. Ben did mention a Waterfall Technique, but I'm not sure what that is.

Rob's thoughts.

Lunch Break

Lunch was most awesome. I got to spend some time with Katie and Holly. We sat on the stairs outside soaking up the beeuutiful Sydney weather.

Oh so cute.

Mark Mansour

RedBubble: Building a site for people with big imaginations - Mark gave a great talk on his experiences with Red Bubble, a Ruby based development firm. He went into a detail on some of the must have techniques when developing a web application. He talked about Functional Tests and using a tool called Selenium. He talked about the need to unit tests in every stage of development and how Rails makes this an easy habit to get into.

Mark talked about storyboarding as a Getting Things Done method. You create cards with simple stories on them that relate to a task that can be completed. eg: "As an Admin I can make a user account inactive". On a wall or whiteboard you draw 3 columns. Todo, Doing and Done. You then place the stories in the appropriate column. Obviously to start with everything will be in the Todo column. Then you then make little printed avatars of your team members and place them on on the task they will be responsible for. As you move each story from Todo, to Doing and finally Done the person responsible remains bound to the story. Once reviewing with the team that the task is actually done, and complete the developer can move to the next task. The idea of this process is that you always know visually who's doing what and also what's been complete. Another tip Mark gave was to keep a bunch of cards with wishlist stories on them, so that if you get through the core tasks ahead of time you can pick up a wishlist task.

Mark also suggested making the development cycle weekly, starting and ending on Wednesdays. Deploying mid-week means the team will be focused to start on new tasks as it's Wednesday and not Monday.

Stephen Cox

Building Ethnography into the design process - Stephen's talk was probably the least techy, however it was related enough to make it interesting. The main points I got from his talk... The key Ethnographic Techniques: Observation, Contextual Interviews, Structured Interviews, Diaries and Probes. I wont go into the details of each... One of the key messages I got from the talk is that having Ethnography can be vital to getting the broader context of the problem you're trying to solve with a design and web application. Often as developers we aren't in touch with this so sometimes it can be worth considering.

Mark Pesce

Mob Rules - The final talk of the conference was inspiring and eye opening. Mark talked about the power of The Mob. Mobs are what make things happen. Mobs are powerful and influential. The internet brings a global power to Mobs. These were the motives behind Mark's talk. I didn't get to take any notes and because I've taken so long to write this post, I've forgotten the finer details of his talk.

End of Conference

I was pretty stoked to be part of the conference. I learned heaps and it gave a new perspective on the work I do day-to-day. There were some post drinks held for some classic geek mingling but I didn't hang round too long as I wanted to catch up with the Family and start our weekend.

Peas!

As we sat waiting for the first speaker, we were excited beyond comprehension.

This was the schedule, and below is my lil recollection of Day 1.

Rashmi Sinha

The Perils of Popularity - Rashmi Sinha is co-founder and CEO of SlideShare, a surprisingly popular application for sharing your boring powerpoint presentations, who'd a thunk it huh? Her talk stemmed from the experience she had with SlideShare. She coined a term, Playing the Game, which meant how you can use your website to create mob like behavior. Examples of the current Game Players were Digg, YouTube and Flickr.

Andy Clarke

Think Like A Mountain - Andy was my favorite speaker last year and he did it again with a talk that showed shiny button web2.0 interface designers that you can get inspiration from real life things like comic books. He showed lots of different examples from comic books and how the illustrators used space and proportions to convey the message. He linked the tight limitations of comic books to web design. When illustrating a comic, the artist has to fit so much dialog into such a limited space.

Plugs

• CSS Eleven, a project dedicated to improving CSS 3
• Watchmen - Comic Inspiration, which I went out and bought the next day!
• Sin City - Comic Inspiration
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCleod.

Scott Buchanan & Ben Maguire

Harnessing The Law to Commercialize and Protect IP - We actually didn't want to see this talk, but because Christos needed to pee, we missed out on Cameron Adams - The Future of Web Based Interfaces. His room was literally spilling out the door. Our next best option was listening to Lawyers talk about Protecting your IP, which although generally boring, gave some good insight into the challenges web applications can bring to lawyers. I have to admit, I didn't take any notes in this session and can't really remember any highlights. ha.

Lunch Break

When the lunch bell went, Christos and I checked out some of the stalls. Microsoft had one promoting their new product, SilverLight. The presentations were a bit to detailed to really get an idea of what the suite can do. This guy was very into it.

John Allsopp

Trends and Predictions in Web Technology - Johns talk gave some good insight into the current state the web, and how it might change in the near future. He coined the term "Web Everywhere". The idea is that the web should be seamless in our everyday lives. It's obvious we're in the very early stages of this phase. He pointed out flaws in todays web application market with ownership. For example; we upload thousands of photos Flickr, yet if Flickr were to pack up and head for the hills tomorrow, there goes your photos along with all the meta data (comments, contacts, tags), and there wouldn't be much you could do about it. It's the same scenario with Amazon and your reviews, YouTube and your Videos etc.

Plug

• John wrote Xray. Nice one!

Brian Fling

Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0 = ? - Brian's talk was centered around Mobile 2.0 and how location based services will be the next big thing. The idea is that your phone should always know where you are in relation to who and what's around you. For example if you need a drink your phone should be able to tell you where the nearest pub is. You could easily find your mates because your phone knows about them.

Plug

• Blue Flavor made Leaflets, which take advantage of RSS feeds to make handy iphone versions current sites like New York Times, Flickr and Newsvine. Cool huh?

Chris Wilson

Moving the Web Forward - Time for a speaker from the browser we love to hate. Chris Wilson works for Internet Explorer as a Platform Architect, he's also on the Web Standards Project team. He gave an excellent talk on the challenges the Internet Explorer team has with developing their browser to meet todays standards but also not break the millions of sites that rely on non-compliant rendering. By the end of the talk I had a lot of sympathy for Chris and Internet Explorer. They have it tough... poor fellas.

When Chris paraphrased Barbie with, "Security is hard", in a nerdy squeaky voice. I laughed.

Christos was listening intensely.

End of Day

I met up with the family afterwards for some good tucker in Chinatown :). Christos headed back to Brisland.

Day 2 wrap-up coming soon....

Roar

First up was a trip to Suncorp Stadium to watch Qld Roar play Sydney FC. It was a great night overall, but the game itself was........um....... crapola mono-mola. End result Qld 0, Syd 1. Shots on goal: Qld 16, Syd 1. Nice one guys.

Danny, Matt and his Girlfriend came.

Tim came and spent more time scaring Holly than watching the game.

Holly was brave and curious.

Oh and we ran into Mr Matt P (works with us).

Gold Coast

The next day was nu school family time. Myself, Katie and Holly headed south for the night to uber chillax on the Gold Coast.

We hit the beach, but it was windy and cold so no swimming. Instead we walked for an hour. Holly loved it.

But didn't last long.

We got up at the crack the next day to take Holly for a heated spa. She loooooved it.

Had a fantastic weekend. This week should be pretty cool too. I'm heading to Web Directions South, a conference for web geeks.

We had started work on a piece for a a new German periodical to be published in broadsheet newspaper format. This is being put together by some of the guys from Lodown magazine. Unfortunately the newspaper has been delayed. But here's a glimpse of some of James' development sketches and an idea of where we were going. This should confuse you...

Caught the Simpsons Movie on Wednesday! Sorry to all you haters out there but it rocks. I've grown up on the Simpsons, so finally seeing a movie devoted to 4 finger funny people was mega rewarding. Even better I got to catch it will my Sis Kerri. Radx2.

Till Next time :)

Till Next time :)

I've busy working on a new site for Jeweller, Nicky McCourt. It's turning out quite nice. It's built on Expression Engine and is probably the largest implementation I've made. Every time I work with Expression Engine I find a bunch of new features that make development a joy. We're in testing mode at the moment. and the site should be live by mid July.

I've also been working hard on a nifty web application with my developer amigo Chrusty Christos Pappacino. He's good at Rails. We're making something quite special and we're very excited about it. It's a little while off yet so I made a little mood design to keep our spirits high.

It's getting dang cold in Brisbane and I love it. Cold = good when you don't get much of it. Enjoy it folks, cos the sweaty undies will be back very soon and you'll all be complaining about the heat.

Ciao for now.

Vitamin R. Goes straight to the head. Ruby will teach you to express your ideas through a computer. You will bewriting stories for a machine.

Poignant Guide

Sitting cosy in my room now. Heck yes!