This past week I attended An Event Apart in Minneapolis. It was a really great time with a star-studded cast of web folks. I wanted to post some of the highlights and the insights I gained.
Whitney Hess’ talk about user interface brought up a few examples that really caught my ear. She’s a really good story-teller and I found that there were a couple of anecdotes that really stuck with me. She talked a lot about how Harvest have done a great job in developing their product partly due to how easy they make it for the user to provide feedback and get help if needed — it’s part of their culture. She also brought up an example of a guy deep within a government organization who still had a huge impact by looking at search stats. I’ve been meaning to look into search stats more and that story was the push I needed to try some new things.
Dan Cederholm and Eric Meyer gave some detailed talks on CSS3 and show some great examples of putting it into action.
Luke Wroblewski, who I hadn’t heard of before, gave a great talk advocating that we should develop applications for mobile first. A lot of the other speakers throughout the conference re-iterated how crucial mobile is and will be over the next few years. The mobile web is where the audience increasingly is and if we are to make any impact as web developers we will have to become adept at designing and developing for it. Good wake up call — now time for some development.
Ethan Marcotte gave a wonderful talk about what he’s calling Responsive Web Design. In other words, that’s designing and developing websites so that they are based on a flexible grid sytem and respond with specific styles depending on the requestor (using the new functionalitly available through @media in CSS3). He made reference to an insteresting article, A Dao of Web Design, in ALA’s Archives. He gave some great examples, some clean code, and well-thought ways of designing websites that look great on the desktop and the mobile browser.
Jeffrey Veen concluded with an inspirational (and fast-paced) talk on How the Web Works. My takeaway was that if you want to be successful on the web you need to get-the-code-out-there-already. Working code and prototypes trump all kinds of blabber and carrying on. I think this is a great principle and, in fact, for a while now, I’ve been trying to create prototypes as a starting point. The questions and answers (especially with non-developers / designers) become so much more useful when we can see and interact with something. As a developer, the biggest challenge is overcoming the inertia and just getting something working. Jeff used a great quote:
“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product,
you waited too long.”
- Reid Hoffman
Jeff was an incredible speaker. He has an ability to present an idea, back it up with great examples, and talk fluidly and fluently while running a parallel slideshow. The ~180 slides he showed fit his narrative very well, but very often he was showing a slide, allowing you to read or look at it, while he was continuing to talk and make a point. Quite an art.
After finishing Jeffrey offered to buy a beer for anyone who wanted to talk with him and would continue the discussion in the bar of the hotel. I was impressed — and sad that I had plans right after the conference ended.
AEA Minneapolis 2010 was a great time — I would recommend.
