SXSWi – Saturday – Day 2

Despite the trials and tribulations of yesterday, things are going well. I woke up, got breakfast, showered, and took my nine dollar cab ride downtown.

The MondaySaturday panels were alright. Many were geared towards going into business for yourself, which I don’t really have any desire to do at this point in my life. Despite all that, I’ll detail the panels I went to.

Traditional Design and New Technology

This talk was was geared towards towards discussing the effects traditional design, read print design, has had on new design, read the web. This was a fairly interesting panel discussion, but didn’t really apply to me as I’ve never done any print design, nor do I really care to for that matter. It was interesting, though, prior to the start of the panel discussion the moderator said the opinionated one of the group would be Jason Santa Maria, however, the opinionated one ended up being Mark Boulton. We thought it was interesting at least.

How to Be A Web Design Superhero

I suppose I sort of went to this panel by mistake. I had originally listed Ajax: What Do I Need to Know? as my 11:30 choice, but I was under the impression that it was at a different time. C’est la vie. Despite that, this was still a fairly entertaining panel. I won’t say that it was the most interesting, but certainly entertaining. I will also say that they had the nicest slides I’ve seen so far.

The reason this panel wasn’t all that interesting was that they didn’t actually tell me anything I didn’t already know. It’s was basically just a bunch of analogies between web designers and super heroes.

Jim Coudal / Jason Fried Opening Remarks

This was an interesting session that I went to. Jim Coudal is the big cheese at Coudal Partiners and Jason Fried is the president of 37 Signals. It seemed more like it was about Jason’s opinions on everything, though. Jim mainly just sat in his chair and chimed in every once and a while.

The interesting part of this session was Jason’s opinions on development. Basically, he has the mindset that the faster you get to doing stuff, the better off you are. This contrasts many peoples’ idea that you should plan things out before hand. He believes you shouldn’t worry about things like functional specs and anything over a basic featureset for your product. I can’t say that I agreed with much of what he said. To a certain degree, he has a point. A lot of projects, particularly in larger companies or say the education sector, take a lot of time – too much time – to get off the ground and actually provide a product. So, on that wave of thinking, I do agree, but he just took the idea a little further than I would say is a practical idea.

How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting

This was an interesting panel, though a bit lower level than I would have liked. More or less it was a DOM Scripting 101 kind of panel. I don’t consider myself a JavaScript writer by any means, but to me, JavaScript is just another programming language. I know how to program, so it doesn’t seem all that hard to me. They did mention some things that I wasn’t directly aware of, such as using cloneNode() to create one basic node and use that cloned node as opposed to creating many of the same node. Despite the presentation being for more of an introduction to JavaScript, it was still good to go and get a sort of refresher on it.

Starting Small: Web Business for the Rest of Us

None of the 5pm set of panels seemed all that interesting to me, so I just went to the one that Jeff and Wilson went to. The panel was interesting enough, I suppose, but like I said initially, it was geared towards stuff, in this case starting your own business, that I wasn’t interested in. Furthermore, it seemed like it was just stuff you should already know before taking that huge leap of quitting your day job.

That was the quick rundown of the panels I attended. Afterwards we went to the Frog Design party located somewhere in the warehouse district. It was cool enough, I suppose, open bar, though all they had for beer was Foster’s and Miller Light. Also, they had no hard alcohol. Just wine and beer. Free is free though. We all left that party after a while and went to the South By Northwest party at the Iron Cactus bar. A quick tangent: we seem to always end up at the Iron Cactus for meals. That party was really packed, probably not all that many people, really, but mainly that it was such a small space.

I suppose that’s all for now, tomorrow I will update everything that happened on Sunday.