Mashed Articles

Beer
and Code

Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.
Last Saturday I got to attend the Facebook
Developer Garage in downtown Chicago that was hosted by Clarity
Consulting.  I am a relatively new user to Facebook,
so I had a lot to learn about Facebook as a web site and as a developer platform.
I am glad that I went to the event because I learned a lot about both of these things.
Overall the event was pretty good, but it was not without its hiccups.  The biggest
hiccup was that Facebook was supposed to send someone to give the keynote address,
but at the last minute they had to pull out of the event (probably got a great idea
about a new feature that they just had to implement).  There was some delay while
trying to set up a video conference with them that never got started.  In the
end, Jia Shen from Rock You! (a company
that builds applications for social networks like MySpace and Facebook)
stepped in a gave a great keynote presentation.  He did a great job
of explaining the basics of the platform and then showed us newbies how
to build a “hello world” style application on the platform.

I spent a lot of time talking with the various attendees and I got to see
what some of the startup companies where doing with Facebook, like Swap
Simple who have integrated the facebook login with their site.  I added several
new friends to my Facebook account and even ran into Jeremy and Kevin from Web414 at
the event.  I then spent some time building Mashups of
Facebook photos with popfly. I took some pictures
of the event, you can see them on Facebook or on Flickr.

Thoughts on Facebook as a platform

I like Facebook as a web application, but I am still trying to figure out how much
of a developer platform that it is.  They have done some impressive stuff with
opening up their web site to people who want to build Facebook “applications”.
However, the standard Facebook application runs on the Facebook website.  I don’t
see a lot of openness to exposing the data outside of Facebook (there was
some information that you could tap into from popfly, but it was limited).  I
look at other platforms like Flickr and Twitter where there is a rich eco-system
of complimentary applications that have been built on the APIs from those
sites and I don’t see that yet in Facebook.  I hope that over time they start
to open up more Internet based APIs so it will grow into a true platform.  Maybe
they were working on that last weekend. 

Thanks again to Clarity for hosting such a cool event.  They paid for coffee
and doughnuts in the morning and pizza and beer in the afternoon.  Way to step
up guys.

Speaker
Badge

Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

Yesterday (Saturday the 13th) was the IndyTechFest in Indianapolis,
IN.  IndyTechFest is an all day technology conference that is centered around
Microsoft Technologies (mainly .NET and SQL Server).  It is co-presented by the Indianapolis
.NET Developers Association and the Indianapolis
Professional Association for SQL Server.  It is very similar to the “Day
of .NET” or “Deeper in .NET”  events that have been held in other cities. 
They had close to 400 attendees and the entire event was free to participants, thanks
to some great sponsors.

What does it take to put on a conference like this?

I was amazed at what a professional conference the organizers were able to put on
using a volunteer work force, especially because this is the first time that they
have held the event.  This event was on-par with smaller technical conferences
that I have been to that cost in the neighborhood of $795 to attend.  Some interesting
things to note:

• They ordered 100 dozen doughnuts, or roughly 3 for each person

• Each attendee got a “swag” bag that was a nice conference style messenger bag filled
  with goodies from some of the sponsors (including a T-shirt)

• They had an unreal number of giveaways including over 150 books, a Halo 3 branded
  XBOX (with controllers and a copy of Halo 3) and a Halo 3 legendary edition (the one
  with the master chief helmet)

• There were 25 sessions across 3 tracks with lots of great presenters from Indianapolis
  and from across the region.
  

The Keynote

Buck
Foley Keynote

Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

The day started off with a bang during the keynote.  They had the usual 10-15
minutes worth of logistical information (thanking the sponsors, describing the session
format, talking about the user groups who put on the event).  Then Brad Jones
came up to give an overview of the technology landscape in Indiana.  Hey talked
about the number and type of jobs that were available in the area (a large number
of open positions for people who know the Java platform).  Brad works in the
online publishing business, so he also explained how the online publishers “judge”
the popularity of technologies based on the number of articles read and keywords searched
for.  There was some surprising data in there and I hope to spend some time with
Brad to publish some of the findings that he talked about (quick preview: Java is
still number one, C/C++ is number 2, Visual Basic is growing like gang busters). 
When Brad tried to give give his views on technology trends, he was rudely interrupted…

Buck Foley, a motivational speaker who is “thrice
divorced and lives in a van down by the river” busted in on the presentation. 
Buck is a distant cousin to Matt Foley, who you may remember from the Saturday Night
Live fame.  Buck spent about 15-20 minutes describing his views on technology
and giving us a preview of the conference.  This included:

• Pointing out that today’s conference was not just about technology you were also going
  to learn about music (C#)

• “You guys also also going to learn about a lot of Diseases (TFS, VSTS)” he added “You
  want to make sure that you don’t catch any of those”

• Railing on both of my sessions – s+s and mashups

• Giving the most hilarious explanation of LINQ I have ever heard

Dave Bost got the whole thing on video tape,
but it is almost unusable because they camera was shaking so much as he was laughing
too hard while he was recording.  We are in talks with Buck Foley’s agent to
get him to appear at an MSDN Event or a Devcares.

Note:  Not only is imitation the sincerest form of flattery,
but Buck Foley also donates a portion of his proceeds to the Chris Farley Foundation.

Code to Live roles into town

Code
to Live DPE

Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

Code To Live is a program that my colleagues Josh
Holmes and Steve Loethen are
putting on this year.  I will have a separate blog post describing the program
and everything that it entails (and ask for your participation in the program). 
Josh and Steve are currently on a kick off tour where they are touring around to various
events on a Harley-Davidson Road King.  Josh spent Friday and Saturday morning
at the Devlink Event in Nashville,
TN, but drove up for the afternoon and gave an impromptu “closing remark” to the
IndyTechfest crowd.  The crowd really liked the fact that we wheeled the motorcycle
into the conference area (not sure if that was cleared with building management ahead
of time or not). 

But wait there is more

I did 2 sessions at IndyTechFest.  One on software and services and one on Mashups. 
I will give a quick recap of those sessions and post the slides that I used in a blog
entry in the next couple of days.  I also recorded a couple of podcasts with
some of the speakers at the event including Chad
Campbell, Tim Landgrave, Robert
Bogue and Brad Jones.  Each podcast was interesting in its own ways, but
the one with Brad Jones was especially interesting because I asked him what it takes
to put on an event like IndyTechFest.

If you would like to see more pictures from Indy TechFest, please click here.

Technorati
Tags: IndyTechFest07 , IndyTechFest , Code2Live

Note: 
This entry was updated after being posted to correct a typo

I got to attend the An Event Apart conference
in Chicago this week.  An Event Apart is the in person version of the
popular web magazine A List Apart, which
bills itself as “explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with
a special focus on web standards and best practices.”

This is a different style of conference than what I am used to, and the change was
refreshing in some ways.  Normally I am used to a conference where they have
somewhere between one and three keynotes over the course of the conference in
a massive room.  All other sessions take place in between 3 and 50 simultaneous
breakout sessions.  At An Event Apart  there were no keynotes
or breakouts.  All of the sessions took place in the same room and all of the
attendees saw the same session.  It was great in that you did not have any angst
to go through in picking out which session to attend (always stressful because you
have the fear of picking the “wrong session”).  The other benefit is that during
breaks everyone is talking about the same topics, because you just saw the exact same
session.  Here is a quick overview and some thoughts from today’s sessions.

Secrets of the CSS Jedi Session

Eric Meyer is a CSS guru, it is hard to have
a conversation about CSS with his name popping up as part of the conversation. 
He gave the opening presentation called “CSS Jedi”, in which he built around his
demo of how to take an HTML Table of sales data and strictly using CSS was
able to turn it into a bar graph.  You can see the before and after on his web
site here. 
 

Key Takeaway

You can’t completely divorce the content from the presentation.  We get really
hung up on the “separate your content from the presentation” mantra when we talk about
the value of CSS.  I think everyone would agree that using CSS is the right thing
to do, but his point was that you have to have some presentation built into your content,
or you can’t do any styling.  His example, which was very insightful, was that
you can’t apply CSS formatting to a text file, because there is no structure to anchor
to.

Writing the User Interface Session

Jeffrey Zeldman gave this talk on the importance
of copy in the design process.  ”Design helps people read less” and
“Copy is the easiest and cheapest part of you site to fix” where two of the key
messages.  It re-enforced the Copywriting
is Interface Design section of Getting
Real by 37 Signals.

Designing Your Way out of a Paper Bag Session

Jason Santa Maria is the creative director
for Happy Cog Studios and this session was
insights into his personal design process.  Jason showed us a lot of the projects
that he had worked on in the past (some of the stuff that he has done includes the
current version of A List Apart, the new WordPress logo
and the redesign of dictionary.com). 
The most remarkable part of his session was that he would show you the evolution of
the design process.  He would show you “before” images of sites, sketches he
made in his sketchbook, early prototypes he called “Grey Blocks”, later drafts and
finally the finished product.  It was really neat to see evolution of the design
process.

Search Analytics for Fun and Profit Session

Lou Rosenfeld is the co-author of Information
Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites (an
awesome book) and his talk was focused about how to look at search logs and gain insights
into what your customers are looking for.  He gave a great explanation of “the
long tail” with real data from a search engine log.

Interesting points

• Many search results are seasonal (searches for the word “football” are at a peak in
  September and October)

• The #10 search result on a typical search results page (1-10) is actually clicked
  more often than the number 6,7,8 and 9 results on the same page

• Don’t underestimate the value of a manually configured “Best Best” on a search result
  for common searches

• Most search results fall into the Zipf distribution (where the name “the long tail”
  come from), but you should not ignore the queries that people do in the second half
  of the distribution.  You can find some really interesting results.

The Seven Lies of Information Architecture

Liz Danzico is an information architect with Happy
Cog Studios.  Her presentation focused on the 7 rules that you
can break, including: Navigation must always be consistent, There is a magic
number sever (plus or minus two), and Users must get to all parts of the site all
the time.  One of the neatest things about her presentation was that to prove
some of her points she would show a portion of a screen shot and ask you what it is. 
We (as human) develop a natural pattern recognition.  Do you recognize what this
is despite the small snip?:

   

Interface Design Jugging

Dan Cederholm walked us through a lot of
interesting graphic and design issues.  He did this via a guided tour of his
sample site “Toupee Pal”.  He then shifted
gears and started talking about Microformats. 
I mentioned Microformats last week in Madison, WI during my presentation on Mashups. 
Check them out, they have now achieved sufficient mass to pay attention to them.

Attendee Party

I am not going to blog at the attendee party.  I am going to hit “publish” and
head over to Fadó Irish Pub. 
Look for another update tomorrow.