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11 September 2006
d.Construct 2006 - a retrospective
Posted by Richard Wallis at September 11, 2006 02:05 PM
Having got back from the excellent d.Construct 2006 conference in Brighton last week and looking at my intermittent postings from the event, I thought a retrospective overview may be of interest for those that missed out on the opportunity to attend.
Sessions:
Jeff Barr, Amazon – Web Services: Fueling Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Classic Jeff Barr presenting the compelling dual case for building your business on top of Amazon’s web services (SAAS) and building your application on Amazon’s computing services – he coined the new term 'Hardware-as-a-Service' (HAAS). Even including humans in the loop via api calls to Mechanical Turk. - Maybe Mechanical Turk should be labeled PAAS - People-as-a-service.
Subject of much post-session discussions around who was brave enough to let Amazon be your mission critical partner.
Paul Hammond & Simon Willison, Yahoo! – Web Services for Fun and Profit.
The key message from this entertaining pair was: Be it an internal or an external service, build it from Web Services. This will by default encourage innovation and make work more enjoyable. Yahoo! Run internal hack-fest days to encourage such innovation.
Jeremy Keith, ClearLeft (Conference Organisers) - The joy of API.
An interesting ramble through Jeremy’s mashup experiences. From an api producer’s point of view, the key messages were: The simpler the better – if you can understand the api call from what its URL looks like you are a long way towards getting your api adopted. SOAP is far too heavyweight and obscure – REST rules.
Aral Balkan – Mash My Flex Up.
Aral did a good job of promoting of Flex 2 and the Flash Platform as a superior environment for Open Source web development. Adobe may own the player, but it is openly distributed and more powerful and capable than AJAX.
Derek Featherstone, FurtherAhead – Accessible Web Applications in a Post Web 1.0 World.
His brief was “How do we build modern web applications that use DOM Scripting and Ajax-type technologies and ensure that they are accessible”.
He debunked the myth that the route to an accessible site was just to turn off JavaScript, and went on to point out the simple things you need to do to make things like pop-up suggest boxes useable in a screen reader environment.
Thomas Vander Wal, InfoCloud Solutions – Understanding Folksonomy (Tagging that Works).
The least exciting session of the day. His key message was that you must retain the three way relationship between the tag, the object being tagged, and the identity of the tagger. That way you have the ability to build up information about communities who are tagging etc.
Jeffrey Veen, Google – Designing the Complete User Experience.
Jeffrey was pushing the mantra of lots of User Research as early as possible in a project. Identify their objectives and goals and match them to your feature list. If they don’t want it why develop it – if it’s not on the feature list it probably should be - supported by pictures of walls full of post-it notes in the Google Offices of the Web Analytics team.
He also was pushing the need to ‘design’ the user experience [functionality, features look and feel], not just the look of a site.
Other not in session things of interest:
- Impromptu ‘Microformats picnic’ took place in the park at the rear of the venue at lunchtime. Microformats were a hot topic in the back-channels of the conference. Microformats is the new RSS! In the same way that RSS is a simple easy API to your data events, embedding your on-screen data in miroformats provides a simple open api to the data itself.
- Conference social networking was supported by a backnetwork provided by conference sponsor Madgex.
Of the 350 attendees, 260 registered with it. Great way of tracking people's contact details [all in microformats] and who you met with. Also provides feeds from blogs and Flickr tagged dConstruct06.
Overall, a good conference well worth attending - I'll be looking out for next year!
Technorati Tags: d.construct 2006, dconstruct06, Web Services, Web 2.0, AWS
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0
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Comments
Damn, too bad they don't have the presentations online... I'm quite curious about those, specially Jeff Barr's - seems that this presentation was a kind of follow-up to his Mech. Turk's presentation at XTech 2006...
Posted by: Mind Booster Noori at September 11, 2006 03:50 PM
Presentations and podcasts will be online soon.
Posted by: Andy Budd at September 11, 2006 07:27 PM
