Rubberband Wound

Three days down, one more to go. Day one seems so far away, which makes me all the more greatful for the notes that I have. While I’m sure I’ve missed a couple things as a result, being able to go back to these notes, even now, brings back memories and ideas and ‘that thing I have to do now’. In some small way, I feel as if I’ve captured part of the motivation that I felt when I was sitting in those ballrooms, against the wall or in a chair.

I’ve attended most of the panels I had in mind before I arrived, with a few exceptions. I don’t regret any that I’ve seen so far, and I’m ’super jazzed’ for one more day.

1000 - Getting Unstuck

• Unstuck - the act or process of:
  • doing good work
  • being productive
  • feeling fulfilled on a team
• Continuous Communication / Feedback - keep the loop going, when people stop communicating, everyone stumbles.
• "Better to be a flamboyant failure than a mediocre success" - allow for mistakes to happen, continually work on projects
• Base problem in stuck companies is an absence of trust
• Have openness around which trust can be built
• Writing down ideas makes them more concrete - you can actually see what works and what might have potential (1%)
• Don’t be afraid of menial tasks outside of what you do - it’s about adding value and can bring something new to the table.
• When we talk to clients for the first time, we don’t know what they want, and they probably don’t either
  • we understand your context, but we don’t know what we’ll design for you
  • as we undersand the context more, the design will come from it.
• Make a list of Business Goals and User Needs - if you don’t acknowledge that you have users, you won’t have users.

1130 - Scaling Your Community

• Be as useful for the first 100k as the last 100k
• Start with a good foundation - if you’re on a shaky base, the taller you get the more likely you are to topple over
• "Be your most passionate user." - eventually, others will surpass your passion, as the site becomes something beyond your intentions.
• Realize that you can’t do everything yourself, and make yourself let go when the time comes.
• Respect your users’ time. - what they want to do is not use your software. your software is a means to an end.
  • there is a higher goal, your site is a way for them to realize that goal.
• Personalization is a filter, a way to bring users the information that they’ll care about out of the tangled web of everything else.
  • at a certain point, there is too much data for any one person to consume it all
  • personalization is brining data to the user, throw a little something random to keep it fresh.
  • personalization is not customization

1400 - The Growth of Microformats

• Another panel without a lot of notes, but a ton of ideas.
• Microformats let you take information out of the pages, extract it and work with it
• HTML succeeded because it was simple, Microformats have been kept simple, small, not a lot of formats
• Microformats must be supported by an existing problem from the web.

1530 - Rails and AJAX

• Rails has always been built around extractions of solutions to real world problems
• Loading effects happen on the request
• Displaying effects happen on the response - instead of having them lumped together

1600 - Javascript - The Big Picture

• Social divides in the web dev worlds
• web developers are generally from almost any background except for computer science
• app developers generally have a formal computing science background
• result: they have a different view on programming (happy go lucky vs. structured)
• We need better communications and more sharing about the things that matter to each of those perspectives.
  • web about standards, accessibiliy, and CSS/HTML
  • dev about structured, robust code

1700 - The Death Of The Desktop

• What’s an interface?
• The way you accomplish tasks with a product - what you do and how it responds
• To the user, the interface is the product
• If you sit down and write a manual for your product and it’s difficult to explain how to use the product or how to use the interface, something is wrong.