After Webstock 2008

Webstock 2008 is now over.   The brainwaves have subsided and the hangover ended.   A massive thanks should go to the Webstock team for organising what can only be described as world class event.

 

Whilst many would have seen some of these talks or content before (especially the podcast nuts) – there’s simply no substitute for taking two days out to talk face-to-face with some of the most respected dudes in the business.  You get two days to let it all soak in – and you get to see many angles over the course of the conference.   It was a great investment of my time.

 

Here’s some of the stuff I got out of Webstock 2008.

• Tags and Taxonomy.   Free tags are like leaves.  A gazillion of them, but eventually they all fall off the tree, rot, and end up feeding the tree’s structure (the taxonomy).   Tags are for quick learning.  Taxonomy is long term.    A great session from Peter Morville.

• Continuous Integration, Release and Ops Management at Flickr.   It was great to hear from Cal about how the Flickr team run their shop.   Talking to him post conference, I found out Flickr has about 2,500 servers!!  Yikes!  In short, they do everything to make their lives easier, make them more agile, and to reduce risk.  You know, things like continuous integration, continuous deployment to “pre-production” servers, release flags (i.e. flags in the app to turn functionality on/off – to reduce branching), running tests on their software every hour, and building a whole plethora of “one-click” tools to manage all this stuff.

• Achieving Flow.   There was one diagram that Kelly Goto put up, which really hit the nail on the head as to why people get in the flow.  See my (keynote) scribbling below:

          

• Primal Software Development and Managing Design.   I really enjoyed Michael Lopp’s presentations. Fascinating to hear that at Apple, they start their product process with 10 pixel perfect mockups, which they then reduce to 3, then to 1.   Also – a key take away I got from his sessions was that you can build software many times, but you only build culture once.  Go check out his blog, particularly this post - which captures nicely his first presentation.   

• How good design helps tell the story.    Jason Santa Maria showed a great example as to how design helps to augment the story, and how the transition from print to web often loses this.  In short, give your site some “context” sensitive design.  If that kinda makes sense?

• Blending the real world with network data.  Tom Coates gave a great presentation which really opened up my thought processes.  In short, the web is not so much of a collection of web pages, but more a massive collection of data that manifests themselves as web pages (of which is only one form)!   Your product is not your site! (it’s the platform).  And once your size of data gets too large, forget hierarchies – they will collapse under the weight.

• Eloi vs Morlocks.   Remember that our users are Morlocks and that we, the Eloi, must make their lives as miserable as possible.   Seriously, though, this was a great presentation by Damian Conway, who rightly advocates that we must remember that most internet users are just like Grandma.  So design for them, not us.

• Feel their Pain.   The brilliant Kathy Sierra says that we need to actually experience the pain our users feel so that we can “mind read” them.   Seriously.  There’s  theory that it will more effectively trigger our “mirror neurons”.   When you’re usability testing, look at peoples faces.  It’s the feelings that you’re after!  Another great tip when building your help.  Document exactly the questions your users ask in the usability sessions. Exactly how they ask them.

All in all, a brilliant conference.   

 

Thanks Webstock Dudes! 

At Webstock 2008

Cool.  Here at Webstock 2008 - the premier get together of NZ web dudes and dudesses.

 

Great session this morning from Mr Torkington about future trends – and fantastic ad libbing because the laptop he was using “didn’t have the right font”.

 

Good sessions from Peter Morville (Ambient Findability!) and Cal Henderson about how they look after Flickr (build stuff to make your life easier – less risk, more ease, more agile)

 

More to come later. 

Bits of Fun

OK. A couple of goodies here.

#1 X-Moto

Brilliant timewaster stress-reliever reminiscent of that old UK gem-of-a-series otherwise known as Kickstart.

#2 Bin Laden at the APEC Summit

Unbelievable that this happened. Got to make you laugh.

Busy Boy…

Hello All.I am, indeed, still alive.  But have been a very busy boy lately.  But a happy busy boy.We’re working on a large-scale project, built on Rails, due for a bug kahuna release some time this side of winter.It’s been a fantastic eye-opening experience for me, as we’re truly doing the continuous integration thing, and reaping the “long term” benefits – even at this relatively early stage.  I’d heard all the theories from a multitude of people before, but never really seen it executed well in practice.  Until now (big kudos to the guys, especially Will).So what’s this continuous integration all about?:

• Every time some one checks code into the source code “trunk”, all (automated) tests are executed to validate the build – in other words, the build is “validated”
• Everyone gets visibility of the (mostly) successful builds.  Good build = kudos.   We’re doing about 5-10 check-ins per day.
• If a build fails, the project team is notified!!   Bad kudos for the developer.  Bad Kudos = Incentive to improve
• Quality of code is maintained.  Bugs are reduced
• More test coverage = more confidence = faster release cycles = agile business = keep ahead of others
• Eventually leads to a test driven development (TDD) mentality

What it really means is that you are able to change with confidence, and change fast.  If you hadn’t already noticed – this is kinda a key factor for success, if not survival.

 

I’m really chuffed to work with a crew that are committed to this philosophy, and know that what we’re delivering to our client is top drawer stuff.

 

It’s the way to go.