Category: Web Culture

Those cinnamon twists at Starbucks are good, mmm.

Panels!

Barenaked App: The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps

This was one of my favorite panels of the week. This panel was similar to Web App Autopsy on Friday, in that there were a number of web app companies that showed numbers about their app. However, this panel talked more about the costs involved in creating and maintaining the app. The five companies were DropSend, FreshBooks, Mobissimo, Maya’s Mom, and Wesabe. I was very surprised at how much each of these companies had put into their apps, both in startup costs and maintenance as well. Mobissimo, an airline ticket service, was the front runner in spending costs both initially and in maintenance. That’s understandable though because they have offices in four countries. There was lots of good information to take in. Such as, it’s a better idea to get your product out early, and with less features, than to wait around and get it out later. This goes with the mantra of ‘Fail early, fail often’. Another good point, particularly useful to me, is that the panelists advocated not buying your own hardware to run their app on. They suggest using something like Serverbeach, which I have heard of, or something like Amazon’s S3 Service. The latter being something that I’d really like to look into. All in all, really good panel and I’m excited to find their slides online as well as listen to the podcast.

Scaling Your Community

Mr. WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, had a nice talk about scaling the community that surrounds a site or web service. It reminded me a lot of Brian Fling’s talk about the mobile web inasmuch that it was very fluid and free-flowing. His main points for scaling up a community were: build a good foundation, bootstrap, let go, and finally personalize. Building a good foundation means knowing exactly what it is that you’re trying to do. Bootstrapping refers to things like being your most passionate user. Eventually your community will reach a point where you can’t micromanage every single thing about it. It’s at this point that creators often have a hard time letting go of their product and allowing more help from other passionate users. Finally, personalization refers to getting your users to build up a strong bond with your site or service. This is another panel I’d like to hear again when the podcast comes out.

I missed the microformats panel due to a long lunch. I’ll find the podcast sometime.

I also missed out on the Bullet Tooth Web Design panel because it was apparently very popular and the room was filled to capacity very early. I heard that it was a good panel, though not a whole lot of information. So I’m not too concerned about missing it.

I didn’t go to the design patterns panel, but instead went to Javascript: The Big Picture with Peter Paul Koch. Not the best panel ever. It seemed as though he hadn’t really prepared for the panel, which was disappointing. He kept looking down at notes he’d written on paper to know what he was talking about. Furthermore, he has a theory that the type of people at the conference were polarized into two groups: web designers and web developers. One’s who do front-end design and those who do back-end programming. I, unfortunately for Paul, fit into both and consequently break his little theory. To exacerbate this problem, Koch readily admitted that his theory was based on him working with a back-end coder many years ago. When I feel that if I would have missed a panel and not been regretful, then there is something wrong. This was one of those instances.

And then we got the crunk on, boomshockalocka! This was the night of the really good parties.

First was the Great British Booze-Up, which was held at the Lava Lounge. As many have attested to, this place found the right mix of music and conversation. The whole back patio was packed full of people socializing. I had a good time questioning British folk’s long-standing ability to ‘queue’ properly. Incidentally, according to Jeremy Keith, American’s go to the restroom, whereas Brit’s go to the toilet and that you don’t ever queue at the toilet, as that would be weird. I talked with Jeff, Michelle, and Lisa Price about all things American vs. British. Apparently, 2 weeks of standard vacation is simply atrocious. I also got to talk with Sergio again. This time I did happen to mention me bashing on his panel last year. He clarified what he meant by stating that when you have things like time constraints, and there is a faster way of doing things, then it’s perfectly ok to get stuff done the fast way. A statement that I completely agree with. Also, everyone in Austin apparently really likes Shiner Bock a lot, it’s everywhere. Mind you, it’s not bad, but it’s not my beer of choice. However, this was the first time during the trip that I had some. That happens when it’s free. 🙂

After the well went dry there, we headed across the street to the South by Northwest party at the Iron Cactus. Had a good time there as well. I met some good people who got drunk and registered the domain name http://18yearolddwarf.com/. I think it’s hilarious. Speaking of that site though, if any of you folks find this site, shoot me an email because I don’t think any of you told me your names. I also continued a helpful conversation about Ireland with Dan Mall.

After a while though, I was sufficiently drunk and decided to make for ye old Raddisson Hotel.

I tell you, walking everywhere sure makes for solid sleeping. I wake up each morning and I feel like I could just continue to sleep for hours. This morning I said screw it to T.G.I. Fridays and got a bagel from the starbucks downstairs. They need a toaster.Woo, panels!

Designing for Convergent Devices

I wanted to go to this panel because it relates to what we’re doing at work. The panelists spoke a lot about the differences between various web means of accessing the web. The consensus seemed to be that you provide an experience that is knowleagable of its means of access. For example, you can’t take your web app that is normally accessed via a desktop and simply change the headers and then bam you have mobile access. Let me modify that slightly to say that you can, but that you shouldn’t. You have to know take things into consideration like screen size, for example.

Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic

Ah, Jeffy and company’s panel. The panel overall was good, it simply started out slow. The premise of the panel was simply how specific designers do what they do. The beginning of the panel started with things like what influences each designer and how their day progresses. I think a lot of the audience would have preferred to gloss over this part in a much quicker fashion. I don’t think that they necessarily had to take this part out, but perhaps go through it much faster as most people here don’t particularly care. People know how they get things done, if one of the panelists have a completely different way of scheduling their day, I don’t think they’re going to up and change. Then there were ping pong balls, no offense to the panel but I think that could have been cut, too. The latter half of the panel got more into what I think people were expecting. Things like what tools people use to help speed up their day. A lot of the audience questions seemed to help the panel along. And as a side note, Jeff needs to stop worrying so damn much about how the panel went. 🙂

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask

Great panel. Brian Fling of Blue Flavor knows his mobile shit. I think this panel was well done for a number of reasons: his presentation was very flowing and not contrived or forced at all, he’s obviously very knowledgeable about his subject matter, and his actual presentation, namely his slides, were very well organized and were good looking. A lot of good information in it, too. There is a lot of potential in mobile, though on a personal note, I just don’t get it. I think this is mainly due to my crappy phone – a problem which will be rectified as soon as I get back to Kansas. I need to find his slides online, too…

I was going to go to AJAX or Flash: What’s Right for You?, but didn’t.

The Future of JavaScript

This panel wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be about. Basically, it talked about the differences between 1.5 and the upcoming 1.7 versions of Javascript. Seems all nice and everything, except for the fact that Firefox 2.0 is the only browser who is using 1.7. Consequently, I just don’t see any point in using that stuff now. That all being said, block level scope is cool.

Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design

This was a very interesting panel. Usually when you hear of the holy trinity of design you hear about HTML, CSS, and JS or structure, presentation, and behavior. This panel defined the holy trinity as users, content, and business. The theory being that any failure of one would cause the whole app or site to fail. There was also some talk about cohesiveness of teams and things along those lines.

And that’s it for panels on Sunday.

Then we went bowling! Brian, who put on the event, held it at the 300, which is probably the swankiest place to bowl anywhere. Not to mention that the place was huge – 52 lanes. Our team consisted of myself, Jeff Croft, his girlfriend Michelle, Matt Croydon, Nathan Borror, and Chris Kavinsky playing for Wilson Miner who couldn’t find a bus that would get him there on time. After a practice round that I totally sucked at, our qualifying round went quite well. I think most of us on the team were quite surprised. I magically bowled a 102, which ended up being exactly what our team average was. It was just under the 110 average needed to make the next round, but it worked out in the end because we were all pretty tired after the first round itself.

Surprisingly, after we left the bowling alley I decided to call it a night. Crazy huh?