Oh this will come in handy then... I was just looking in my email drafts and I found these notes I made in 2009! At the time I said I was saving them for work. But I'm not longer in that job, don't know if I ever used the notes, here they are:
Freshbook's presentation "Three Vital Marketing Systems for a successful web app" was more MI and marketing based than anything strictly related to me, most things he said were very basic. Some good advice to people just starting out, but all common sense really. Make sure your tracking is absolutely the first thing you do so you can see how you're performing. Even if you cut corners elsewhere make sure you can track how you are doing, what business you are getting from what effort.
I missed the first talk, but I think Kevin Rose's was even more startup based. Set a precedent for the whole event, it was a good show for getting an overview of things, I bet a lot of people's bosses came into work today with a new armoury of buzzwords!
Everyone in the audience was recording in some medium or other, lots of videoing, all heads down in laptops. From looking over people's shoulders there seemed to be a lot of real desktop publishing, or maybe just blog type software that I wasn't familiar with. After much peering it seems people were making Powerpoint presentations as they listened.
A real rock star next! A rock star in the javascript community anyway. Dustin Diaz did a funny and interesting talk about javascript frameworks... no, stay with me! He works for Twitter now, and he compared a lot of different frameworks (like jQuery, scriptaculous, mootools etc), and asked which one was best. The answer: none of them. He was surprisingly anti jquery, saying that using someone else's framework makes you work in a certain way, which might not be the best way for you. If you look at twitter now, they are actually using jquery, he must have plans to replace this though.
He offered more general advice too, key being to avoid over abstraction (there is a danger of your code not meaning anything) and also write more tests but less error and type checking in your code. If you're accepting input from users then you need to check it but if it's from other coders, then you don't. So, don't weigh your code down with lots of
if (( $foo ) and is_array( $foo )) { // treat $foo like an array }which I do. Trust your coders, if they use the code wrong they will get an error and they deal with it. Better to keep your code clean1.
In his rundown of the main javascript frameworks (where he didn't find room for the bbc's own library) he compared each to a different kind of corn. jQuery is corn syrup, because it makes you high and insane. Base was mentioned: dean.edwards.name/weblog/2006/03/base/ and Low Pro (something to do with Prototype?) for jquery danwebb.net/2008/1/31/low-pro-for-jquery but not BBC's Glow, aah.
Next there was a panel, all ASP based, about how and why they built the (fairly poor and pointless) @helloapp game on twitter. This was a jarring microsoft bias, but microsoft were a sponsor.
Addison Berry from Lullabot spoke about open source software, how she makes a living out of it. She is passionate about Drupal (a cms) and makes money providing consultancy on it. The point of the talk was that open source is great and it doesn't have to mean free and companies should do more of it. This was another talk that was maybe good for individual coders or freelancers, but I didn't see examples transferring to work really. Apparently Warner Bros and Sony are each sharing the same Drupal code, and one company has made fixes to the other company's site, in a caring and sharing way.
The whole conference was plagued with tech problems, wifi non existent for most of the first day, even the lights and the mics were failing.
Franciso Tomalowsky of 280 North showed us Atlas and Cappuccino, cool visual app development. It makes a web app or a desktop app from the same code. Atlas is released as a private beta in November, twenty dollars.
David Prager of Revision3 (online TV) says niche to rhyme with rich and it is the key to his whole presentation, bit distracting. Get niche, Get rich, and get mainstream. NO, it's NEESH! Is there a lesson here for us? Do one thing really well, for a very small number of users, and then expand as you go? Again, better suited to someone starting out.
Watching paypal presentation in basement chill out room, just for a bit of variety. There was no wifi here either. Didn't rate the venue much. Good location by the tube, and big enough rooms etc, but only instant coffee? The toilets had also gone a bit Glastonbury, blee. Paypal are opening up to developers, starting at a conference in San Francisco. Can I go? They're using the name "paypal x" for this, and they have domain x.com - cool2. They played us a VERY cheesy video demoing how people might use paypal next. In the future your shopping trolley will have paypal and every flat surface will be an intelligent touch screen that you pay for goods and services through. http://www.x.com thought the video reminded me of this big ass table vid.
Spymaster presentation annoyed me. The idea was "How we cleverly marketed our product successfully on twitter and how you can too". Spymaster was a game on twitter that was very successful for a time, it was different, and generated a lot of press in a short amount of time. I don't believe there were any lessons that anyone could learn from this except "have a good idea, that turns out to be popular". I don't think media buzz like this is a valid strategy as you can only really see it in the rear view mirror. Good question from the audience about how something like spymaster was successful because people really know in advance that every action in the game would effectively spam out adverts for the game to their friends. Speaker Chris Abad didn't really answer this, though he did say "structure the verbage" once.
Facebook connect has got easier to integrate into your site. This really might be one for us to consider if we are going with an optional registration idea. The Facebook talk was a bit of an ad for them. Looking at my notes I do seem to have got more cynical as the day went on, sorry. Facebook translations gave me some good ideas and inspiration too, we won't just ape everything they're doing but it's made me realise how we can improve things here. Facebook have a system where translation is opened right up, everything can be translated into any language by anyone. Translations then go into a moderated list that can be voted on. Not appropriate for our own translations but it did make me think that if all of our translatable bits of language in a site are (say) passed through a modifier when the site is built, like3:
<p>{"Hello"|trans} {$name}</p>where
transis a smarty modifier, then this will pick up the right translation when the site's published to say<p>Ciao Paul</p>but if we pass a certain param to the site, then why not replace that with
<p><a href="translate.php?word=Hello">Hello</a> Paul</p>Got more thoughts on this which we're going to work into a demo of some kind here. Still a bit stuck on if / how we make the person making the template come up with a unique identifier for that phrase, and how we can simplifiy the process...
HTML5 will be nice when it's more fully supported, it encourages MUCH sloppier html that would not pass xml validation, but is simplified and reflects how most people actually use html. Some examples in tomorrow's notes!
Checking out labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/
Too much time was given to Carsonified (organisers of FOWA) industry survey that they had run on techcrunch.com - the site has millions of users, and they only got 65 responses. Instead of quietly brushing this under the carpet they presented analysis of the results. Highlights of the results - most people answered on behalf of an organisation with no budget and no full time resources. techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/help-us-by-taking-the-2009-web-application-survey/
I will be back with more notes.
Then I'm not sure what this is about, some content from the time from twitter maybe? I think this might be a paste of my own twitter output from the duration of the conference. Definitely looks like the kind of thing I would have written.
js: Programming language of the internets, mostly how I make my living.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town. Married and dad to 2, I am a full stack web developr, + I do mostly js / Node, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.