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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