Things That Work

I had a great time at FOWA and Barcamp. I met a lot of people, saw some awesome presentations and demos, drank more in 3 days than I usually do in 3 months, and generally had a great time running around Miami with my Grooveshark peeps (@skylerslade, @boxmonkey, @hotspacejustice, @vishalagarwala, and @efuquen).

I’m still pretty beat (Gainesville/Miami – long drive, but *way* too close to justify flying), so here’s a quick rundown on my experiences:

Thoughts on presentations in general:

Know your audience:
This paragraph particularly applies to some of the BarCamp talks, since BarCamp tends to be more targeted at dev-types and FOWA has a broader scope. You need to know your audience. The same sorts of things that will make money- and marketing-types drool in excitement can send geeky dev-types reeling in horror. Example: data collection/information selling vs privacy issues. This came up in a few places, but none so glaring as the Mozilla Add-ons talk at BarCamp. Is the Mozilla Foundation really encouraging us to use our add-ons to track user behavior across multiple sites (not just interactions with your own product) in order to sell this information later as an monetization scheme? If not, then they need to take a hard look at how they’re presenting this stuff, cause that’s certainly one of the messages I took away from the talk.

Decent slides:
I know not everyone is a designer. I’m certainly not. But if in doubt, keep it simple. I’d rather see plain black text/white background slides that are easy to read than colorful low-contrast slides that are impossible to read on a projector. I’d rather see a short list of big bullet points than a hugely complicated graph that requires to the text to be tiny (and once again impossible to read on a projector) to fit. I guess basically what I’m saying is, projectors can be finicky and often wash out color and in a large presentation, some of your audience is far away. Just keep it in mind.

So now some specifics. Honestly I had almost zero sleep going into BarCamp and it’s all mostly blended together now. So most of this is FOWA related.

Ubiquity:
We saw a brief mention of this in the Mozilla Add-on talk at BarCamp. My first impression was kinda, “Eh, looks vaguely like Quicksilver for Firefox, but I could probably either do/script those things for actual Quicksilver if I really wanted them anyway. Wake me when Firefox stops using 50-70% of my cpu all day, and it might actually be useful.” After seeing the demo at FOWA though, I’m more like “Wow, it looks vaguely like Quicksilver for Firefox! This could make my browsing as seamlessly awesome as the actual QS makes my OS!” The demo certainly seemed pretty snappy, though I haven’t gotten the chance to try it out personally yet. For me, it’s ultimately going to depend on if it grinds my browser to a halt whenever I use it or not. I have enough performance problems with Firefox on my little G4 iBook as it is.

Jason Fried:
I think saying that the culture of free is ultimately harmful is sensationalistic, and I definitely do not agree. Neither do I think that everything should be free. Like most great questions, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Some services should be free, subsidized in some other manner. Some services should cost money, and if they do what people need, they will gladly pay for it. Deciding which category your product fits into? Well that’s the hard part.

Also, do that many people actually think that “Fail early, fail often” was meant to be applied to business models? I’ve always considered it to be more applied to actual code creation – ie, rapid prototyping to try out ideas so they can be thrown away with minimal loss if they suck.

I do agree with his thoughts on flow and the productivity-killing nature of interruption.

Multiple projects are harder to maintain? Um, yes? That nearly seems a tautology.

Dion Almar and Ben Galbraith:
Nifty presentation, though I think HTML5 is still a few years from having enough penetration to be viable for real products. Magic IE compatibillity wrappers sound like a great idea on the surface, but will your users install them? (I’m totally biased, but) Flash already has 99% penetration. And as long as Youtube requires Flash, I’m not too worried about that changing.

I would have liked to see more about newer Javascript interpreters and just why they are so much awesomer and faster than current JS. They just sorta skimmed over that part with a ‘well it’s a bottleneck right now but soon it won’t be’.

Adobe AIR love, but still no love for Flash. I know they’re pushing HTML5, but I really felt like they were just pretending Flash didn’t even exist during this whole presentation.

Dan Theurer
Ugh, first incidence of epic slide FAIL. I felt really bad for him. YQL sounds like a really nifty concept that I’m going to have to look into, though I really hope it doesn’t wind up like SOAP (Awesome concept that just winds up being bulky and inflexible in real life).

Kristina Halvorson:
Grooveshark could definitely use more process for coming up with copy. Right now it’s all by the seat of our pants, and some extra care and consistency could make a huge difference in the user experience. Really cool talk.

I have a lot more to say about women in tech, but that’s going to have to be a whole other post – look for it in a day or two once I’ve gotten all my thoughts collected.

Dave Morin:
Eh, I don’t know. Facebook Connect really doesn’t excite me that much. We’ll see how it takes off.

Joel Spolsky:
This was why I came to FOWA. Joel is one of my heroes. Talent-based model = Yes. Importance of not killing flow = YES. Desire to someday work for Joel = all-time high.

Alex Hunter:
Certainly the prettiest presentation, slide-wise. I’m not sold on the company-specific social network thing, but I’m also not Virgin’s target audience, so I wish them luck.

Fransisco Tolmasky:
I’d heard about Objective-J and Cappuccino in passing before, and had mentally filed it away as something interesting to take a look at someday when I had some time. But WOW, that Atlas demo just blew everyone away. If it’s really as awesome as it looks, Atlas combined with faster Javascript engines might actually get me worried about the future of Flex. Definitely going to keep an eye on this.

Spolsky/Fried interview:
I wish it had been longer.

Gary Vaynerchuk
I don’t know what to say. Gary was awesome. “If you don’t know where you want to end up, you’re broken.” I’ve got some thinking to do on that one. I definitely know my passion, but I don’t know where I want it to take me.

Parties:
The Abbey (especially) was great. I’m a huge beer fan (despite a hops allergy that sadly limits my options unless I’m willing to risk a really uncomfortable face rash that lasts like 3-5 days). At all the various parties, I really enjoyed meeting so many new people, and catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while. I’m a real lightweight when it comes to alcohol, so to all the random women I accosted and drunkenly explained my mission to find another female coder at the event, I apologize. I never did manage to meet one.

And on that note, I am exhausted and this post is really long. Look for another post about women in tech (and my failure to find any fellow girl-coders at the bars) sometime in the next couple days.