On d.construct06
Brighton was basking in glorious sunshine. We entered a dark theatre.
Amazon’s ‘Web Services Evangelist’ Jeff Barr certainly lived up to his title with an articulate sales pitch of Amazon’s Web Service APIs. This was an interesting overview of some pretty exciting tools (S3, Mechanical Turk) which Amazon are offering, and I can see the huge appeal it offers to start-ups, but I was disappointed at seeing what felt a bit like a corporate advertisement being top-billed at a ‘grassroots’ event.
Perhaps I got out of bed too early?
Or perhaps not. Next up - Yahoo! The affable Simon Willison and Paul Hammond described how Yahoo! were the biggest site in the world (200 million registered users - that’s, like, 1 in every 30 people on the planet!), how Yahoo! have acquired some of the biggest start-ups in recent years (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming), and then they focused on Yahoo!’s public APIs and how Yahoo! use them internally to create new products such as Yahoo! Tech. I liked the sound of the internal Yahoo! code jam day (can’t remember the exact title) and I appreciate that these technologies and APIs are pretty spectacular, but again this disappointing from a grassroots level.
Next, co-host Jeremy Keith presented a tech-free introduction to the most popular of these public APIs, notable Google Maps, Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming). 
Jeremy is a good speaker, comfortable on the stage (does this come from his musicianship? Tell us more about that JK) and this was succinct, amusing and to the point. He kindly offered free sarnies at his ‘Microformats picnic’ in the park which I’d like to have attended, but I just had to go to the greatest breakfast/lunch venue on earth.
Although given the graveyard shift, Aral Balkan stole the show with his presentation. Aral is an enthusiastic, energetic presenter and I loved this. I’ve been keeping a keen eye on Flash in recent years and it now seems that some really exiting and groundbreaking things are starting to happen. Aral was focusing on Flex 2 which I’m immediately going to read up about and play around with. The Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2 IDE looks excellent (if expensive for a tool which primarily consists of open source internals) and ActionScript is now a pretty mature language. Aral’s work with osflash.org is excellent and I’m looking forward to developments in that area. Being a developer I really wanted him to go into more detail about his Agile approach and how he uses XP (can you, for example, unit test your ActionScript?), but d.construct probably wasn’t the right platform for that. If you missed it, you can view Aral’s presentation (in Flash format, naturally) on the web.
In Web Applications in a Post 1.0 World, Derek Featherstone took us through the real-world problems which AJAX-enabled sites have with web accessibility. This was very interesting and I was actually rather surprised to find that today’s screen-readers can cope admirably with such sites (for some reason I thought it would be much more problematic for them). The problem is primarily down to developers not spending enough time thinking about accessibility when coding their sites. There’s still a long way to go but Derek’s work is gradually changing people’s thinking.
Thomas Vander Wal, Mr. Folksonomy, talked about tagging. Why we tag, how we tag, when shouldn’t we tag. My attention was wandering at this point to be honest, and my notes descended into daydreaming doodles, but I did manage to write down “hoovers, dogs” for some inexplicable reason. Sorry Thomas ;)
if Jeff Veen hadn’t been billed, this years d.Construct would have been far less appealing for me. It’s always a pleasure to hear him speak and today was no exception. The presentation was ‘Designing The Complete User Experience’ and he used his vast experience to take us from Hotwired and Jakob Neilson through to Quixtar and, finally, Google. With wit and enthusiasm, he explained how he personally addresses user requirements at Google (perform user research up front) and explained that “just following the rules gets us into trouble if we don’t understand context.” This was a thoroughly enigmatic and insightful presentation which should be online soon.
Despite my initial reservations, d.construct 06 was excellent and fantastic value for money (about six times cheaper than @media) - it’s probably the only such event which people can afford out of their own pocket. Hopefully clear:left won’t increase the numbers next year so that it can maintain it’s accessibility and continue to be a true grassroots event. They have created something really special and long may it continue!
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Posted by Olly on September 10, 2006 at 9:01 am in dconstruct06
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Loved that small insight into the somewhat inexplicable workings of your mind in the tagging talk!
Great write-up of d.construct — I almost feel like I was there.
Cheers.
Andy
Thanks for the write-up. Glad you enjoyed the event. We bill d.Construct as a “grassroots event” for a couple of reasons. Firstly the event is targeted primarily at individual developers rather than big companies. One way we do this is by keeping the costs down, so freelancers and people working for small companies can afford to attend. We also see ourselves as a grassroots event as we’re not doing it for the money but for the benefit of the community at large. We’re not a dedicated conference company, just a bunch of web developers wanting to do something fun.
The first event we did was much more “grassroots” with no sponsorship and only about 100 people attending. However we sold out of tickets in half an hour so wanted to increase the capacity this year so more people could attend. This obviously meant needing to get a bigger venue and a bit of corporate backing, but I don’t think sponsorship affected the event at all.
Having 400 seats to fill means that you need to get some fairly high profile speakers to ensure the event is a success. I don’t think we would have been able to fill the capacity if we had Joe Blogs from the local design shop talking about their new CMS system. However the majority of the speakers attending were locals or personal friends, many from smaller companies. The main exceptions were obviously Simon and Paul from Yahoo! and Jeff from Amazon.
Simon and Paul are good friends and have supported our event from the start. They are passionate developers and regular speakers on the grassroots event circuit. Even if they didn’t work at Yahoo! they would have been speaking at these type of events which I think is a testament to their passion as developers.
I agree that Jeff’s talk was just this side of being too corporate. However we thought that Amazon were doing some really interesting things and had some great stuff to show you guys. The event was about APIs after-all so we felt it made sense to invite some of the companies responsible for some of the best APIs.
However I would have liked the event to have been a bit more hand on, so that’s something we’re going to aim for next year. To help keep the community focus of the event we’re going to set up a “steering committee” made up of local developers. Only by listening to the attendees and members of the local community will we be able to keep the event focused on your needs.
If you have some suggestions for great speakers or ways to keep the event “grassroots” our inbox is always open. Look forward to seeing you next year.