Today I got back from three days in London, where I attended this year's Dev8D. Dev8D is quite a remarkable conference (or more accurately perhaps, a conference, unconference and workshops all in one). It is aimed at developers in Higher Education, but open to anyone interested. It offers a great opportunity to learn new skills, get a feel for what is being discussed and important in certain areas, and meet people with the same interests as you.

I went last year for the first time (it has been running for four years now), and I was very happy to go back. The format of the event seems to have changed slightly every year, but what remains constant is the focus on hands-on-learning, and the informal atmosphere.

As there was so much going on at once, I can only write about a fraction of the sessions from first-hand experience, but for anybody interested in the event I would recommend reading the relevant DevCSI blog posts (there's lots of videos and interviews in there). Read more…
 

At the start of the Christmas holidays I was sure that in the next two weeks I would write at least three neat little blogposts. About things to do with kids in Munich (Therme Erding, Wildpark Poing), on the books I was reading (Kahneman, Rushkoff, Crace), coding with kids (with the lovely Swampy suite). I wrote many more blogposts, or fragments of blogposts. In my head. And I have had enough of that. Which is why I am now writing this mini-post, just to get in the swing of things again.

With the heading I don't mean Over the Air and Bletchley Park, as the meeting and the venue seemed really well suited from the start. In fact, I heard from quite a few people, and I would join in with that, that the event should be held here next year, too. No, I have taken this message from a presentation by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux about the somewhat strained relationship between native mobile apps and web apps. He likened this relationship to that between the UK and France, which is also really a love-story (where of course the French are the superior party, just as are web apps compared to native ones ;) )

But let me start at the beginning. My decision to attend Over the Air was quite a spontaneous one, as I felt quite exhausted, and I also didn't know of anybody I knew who was going. But spontaneous decisions can be the best, and this one was especially good.

This was my second dConstruct after last year's, and expectations were high. Have they been met? Ultimately yes, but not so much till after lunch, with the three final talks being especially brilliant in my view. This is not to say the morning talks weren't good though, and I particularly enjoyed Kelly Goto and Craig Mod - although the latter left me a bit puzzled as well!

Anyway, here is a summary of the talks:

Emotional Design for the World of Objects

"We live in interesting times. Everything changes". This was a kind of thread running through Don Norman's talk. And in saying that, I guess he was well aware that it's nothing new. But what exactly are the challenges at the moment? This was Don's take:

• Lack of standards due to many different devices and operating systems, as well as different ways of interacting with them
• Google and others. Again, not exactly news, but probably worth emphasizing it. "What is Google's business model? You are the product, and the advertisers are the customers." And: "They just want your name. Are you happy to be their product?"
• Difficulties of focusing. We can not focus on one device anymore. We cannot just develop for desktop, or mobile. We have to think in systems.
• Experience is not the main thing, it's the memory of the experience that we should think of creating

An interesting observation was the evolution of the ways we interact with programs - although can he be sure it is really going this way? "We started with the command line, then we got the graphical user interface. Now we are moving to gestures. The command line is more efficient. But you have to remember a lot. GUI slower, but easy to understand. The gestures will have to be memorized again. We have come full circle."

For various reasons the start of this year was not that easy for me, and something I wanted to become a tradition already got left behind: To write down what I had done each year, and make plans for the new one. After postponing it a lot, I have decided now is a good time for plans, as I am between projects, and I start to see a little more clearly where I might be going.

2010 + five months of 2011: How did it go?

2010 was a good year overall. New possibilities opened up, I met inspiring people and learned a lot. And it became really clear that web development was what I wanted to continue doing.

This is my report back to Local by Social, following an event in Bristol on 29 and 30 January 2011 that I took part in. The event was about using Open Data to improve services to the public. The first day consisted of a series of talks, followed by a brainstorming session about what comunity apps we would find useful. The second day was a 'hack day'. The ideas by then had been distilled down to five projects, which about 30 people worked on. (The audience at the first day had been at least a hundred.) Ours had a varying number of participants, but I think the final number was three: Mark Braggins, Tim Winship and me. It fell to me to present our ideas at the end, and write it up.

In our group we outlined what our app should do and how it could work, but did not get to the point that we discussed the practicalities of building it. Part of our time was devoted to hearing Tim Davies explain about Open Data, including his Open Data cookbook, and the differentiation to Linked Data. This was very worthwhile, and I will attach some notes at the end of this post. But first:

Web developers flocked in their hoardes to two big events in Bristol last Wednesday: the Web Developers Conference and the Plone Conference, the latter of which is still going on as I write. Both are/were for sure excellent events and I had planned to attend WDC2010. However, I eventually chose to go to a third event that was also being held in Bristol and I did not regret it one bit.

The event in question took place at the ILRT premises in Bristol, and was called "Developing for the Mobile Web". It was mainly directed at developers in higher education - being part of the DevCSI project - but was open to other developers, too.

A large part of this one-day workshop consisted of accounts, sometimes quite in-depth, of the speakers' day-to-day work with the mobile web. That, together with a very informative talk by Phil Archer from the W3C about Mobile Web Best Practices, and a CSS-session at the end, made for a very successful mixture.

I have not been to many web design conferences. And still I'm pretty sure they won't get much more impressive than this. I heard some criticism before going. That dConstruct was not very hands-on and you didn't learn much that could be applied directly. That might be true. It is not so much for the hands than for the mind.

First of all, the speakers were extremely talented and professional. Even if you didn't care about the theme of the conference - which this year was "Design and creativity" - you could take a lot away from the talks, many insights as well as amusing anecdotes from fields as varied as typography, filming and musical improvisation. It was a joy to listen and watch the speakers on the stage.

There is still snow in the streets and it is freezing cold. Yet after two days of closure, school is on again (starting at 10 instead of 9) and my girl has gone, somewhat grudgingly, her brother is off to nursery and their father off to work. Quiet, uninterrupted time, the time to be productive!!

How best to use it? Sometimes a certain anxiety comes with that question. How much will I be able to tick off this time, how much can I manage to squeeze in, is this really the best thing to do right now (GTD is beckoning)? I'm sure I am not the only one who feels like that! Yet today, once everybody had left I decided to write this post, and I was sure it was the thing to do. I might feel a bit stressed once I have finished it, but I wanted to write it all week. It means something to me, because it is about making (professional) plans and targets for the year, and committing to it "in public" - although hardly anybody will read this post ;) (which, at this stage, I don't actually mind).