Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: John Battelle interviews Matt Mullenweg
Audio available at link above.
WP currently powers about 12% of the web. Future of WordPress is as a full platform/CMS, not just a blog.
wordpress.com 290 million uniques per month. Adding a new blog every two seconds.
WordPress at its best is invisible – it gets out of the way.
Continue reading “The Future of WordPress: John Battelle Interviews Matt Mullenweg”
Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Asleep in the Classroom: A Wakeup Call from Tomorrow
America’s students are bored. According to the Gates Foundation, boredom is the number one reason they give for dropping out of school. How can creativity, innovation and technology address this growing crisis in education? If technology is a driver for shorter attention spans, can it also be the solution to bring back the wonder of education? Can we extend the reach further and engage our students more both inside and outside of the classroom, to reawaken a love of learning?
Continue reading “Asleep in the Classroom: A Wakeup Call from Tomorrow”
Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Fireside chat with Tim O’Reilly with Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis, Founder, Mahalo.com
Tim O’Reilly, Founder/CEO, O’Reilly Media Inc
Wonderful way to open a week of stimulating sessions that challenge preconceived notions of technology, politics, and journalism in unexpected ways. O’Reilly was an intellectual silver bullet, as always, but really nice to catch him in an unscripted conversation rather than in one of his more “formal” talks.
Continue reading “Fireside chat: Tim O’Reilly with Jason Calacanis”
Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Dork Intervention: Bringing Design to Agile
Agile is broken. How can designers help deliver products that users will love while grappling with the constraints of agile in corporations? With large companies rapidly adopting agile methods, it is crucial that these teams include designers to create great products. But the agile framework available to larger companies doesn’t take into account the work style of design team members. Agile, by its nature, shortcuts the design process without considering the value that design brings, not only in providing on-the-fly design solutions but also when crafting the vision of a product that the team can build towards. We are designers with agile team experience in the corporate world. These are our stories of triumph and tragedy. Come hear what worked for us and share your own war stories.
Continue reading “Dork Intervention: Bringing Design to Agile”
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 panel discussion Is Canvas the End of Flash?. This debate is really heating up as more browsers gain Canvas support and sentiment seems to be rapidly turning against Flash. But how feasible is it to consider the canvas element a real Flash replacement? Five panelists hashed it out, with excellent points on all sides. Very useful session.
Continue reading “Is Canvas the End of Flash?”
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session Why Your Baby is Ugly – Effective Dashboard Design, with Aaron Hursman of Hitachi Design. Though I’ve only ever worked on one dashboard system, I am interested in data visualization, and this was an excellent crossover session for both dataviz and information design concepts.
Continue reading “Why Your Baby is Ugly – Effective Dashboard Design”
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe, with Darren Delaye and Michael Leggett of Google. I’m more of a back-end guy than a designer, but with an increasing interest in design considerations and usability. This became one of the most useful sessions of the conference for me.
Continue reading “Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe”
Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session Untitled by Jaron Larnier.
Wasn’t sure what to expect from this session, which had no title and no description. But a few weeks ago, the photo professor at the J-School handed me a copy of Larnier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget, a sort of backlash manifesto against the digital age. Well, that’s not entirely fair — it’s not so much a backlash as it is a reasoned, thoughtful wander through some of the gotchas and backwaters of the digital age. Larnier talks about dignity, culture, black boxes, the history of our relationship to technology, mean-ness in online communities, and everything in between. His talk was as meandering as the book is, but inspirational and amazing at every turn. Though difficult to encapsulate, Larnier and his thread is something I feel everyone and tech should be listening to.
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session RIP Content Management System by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.
Unfortunately, the “R.I.P. part of the session title was never addressed, nor were any of Drupal’s core shortcomings or architectural annoyances. This was unfortunately just a 30-minute informercial for Drupal.
Would really have preferred to have heard Dries talk about plans to address Drupal’s deep archtitectural problems like lack of object orientation, lack of an ORM, lack of MVC, and annoying templating system. Took notes anyway.
Continue reading “RIP Content Management System”
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session: Evan Williams Keynote Interview
Director of the Havas Media Lab Umair Haque interviews Twitter founder Evan Williams (@ev). The interview began with technical difficulties, segued into a way-too-brief introduction to the new integration platform @anywhere, got interesting for a little while, then became mired into me-centric, smug ramblings of an interviewer who appeared more interested in showing off his own intelligence than in extracting juicy bits from the interviewee. Eventually the whole thing turned into a train wreck, with audience members walking out in droves. The back-channel was brutal to Haque, and attendees were walking out in droves. A full third of the audience left out of boredom after half an hour. Almost embarrassing to watch.
Continue reading “Evan Williams Keynote Interview”