Three OSCiers attended DevDays DC and for a one day show there were some interesting moments and quite a bit of information to be absorbed.

The conference started with a funny clip by the people at Fog Creek and had a nice lineup of speakers.

You can find my notes from most of the presentations here.

What is the EdUI Conference?

The EdUI Conference is a new conference held by the University of Virginia for the niche of web professionals in higher education. Do not let the tag line fool you. A good portion, if not all information, provided by on-the-front-lines professionals easily translates into other domains of business on the web. The various headlining speakers were all top notch.

I had the privilege of going to one workshop and visiting the condensed version of another. Both were wise investments of time. This website, my BHAG website (amptools.net), and O.S.C. (opensource connections) clients will be able to reap the rich benefits from EdUI in the near future.

Workshop Beyond Blah Blah: Creating Great Content for the Web.

This great workshop was created by David Poteet of NewCity, a company Mr. Poteet founded. The workshop was centered around the ‘best of’. Concentrating in areas of creating/writing great content and essentially it’s architecture.

Some of the sources used to put together the workshop were the “Wizard of Ads Trilogy“, Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath, and a white paper called “Designing for the Scent of Information” by Jared Spool. Anyone related to or responsible for marketing in your business should/must read the Wizard of Ads trilogy if they have not already.

The notes that I took from the workshop are pretty much in the actual slides. They center around 6 tips for developing and organizing content on your site. That being said: the notes and slides are pale in comparison to actually doing the workshop with David. We actually were lead through the KJ session, writing exercises, and more during the workshop. All of these were invaluable experiences.

Beyond Blah Blah: Creating Great Content for the Web. takeaways

See the notes are at the end of this blog**

Workshop New Insights In Web Standards

Molly E. Holzschlag, former group lead of WaSP, co-author of The Zen of CSS design, and all around free spirit, did the workshop on new insights in web standards. The focus here was definitely on HTML5. The results of even the condensed workshop was eye opening.

Unfortunately, I was only able to see the condensed 2nd day version of this workshop. I generally keep tabs on emerging software technology, HTML 5 and CSS 3 being a few of those. I even read W3C specs, which read like legal documents on a good day.

The opportunity of getting the word of mouth version from someone like Molly, saves me a few headaches and hours of reading. Plus gaining another perspective from someone never hurts.

New Insights In Web Standards Takeaways

• HTML 5 is an application markup language.
• HTML 5 is here (partially). Google Wave is an HTML 5 application.
• Backwards compatibility on the web is a must. (however this should be pushed more onto the browsers supporting old documents, not developers/designers)
• The web means open standards, HTML 5 is pushing that, with forcing browsers to provide things like video and audio codecs, animation, etc.
• First html spec that all browser vendors are behind, which is almost scary.
• XHTML 2.0 and its w3 group is gone at the end of this year, no more xhtml. yes. i’m serious.
• XHTML is considered to be a failure.
• IE still slowing down the web. (Well we’ve know this for years, but it might be wise for everyone to charge extra to clients who require IE 6 compatibility or just render plain white document style content to IE 6 users).
• HTML 5 will come in 2 flavors SGML/HTML syntax & XML.
• Opera has the lead on HTML 5 completion, including web forms 2.0 at the moment.
• Javascript is the glue of the web. (fellow Javascript developers, can we say job security?)
• Designers who work CSS and HTML, will now have to be pseudo developers with HTML 5. For Hybrids like me who can do both, that is not a big deal. However being able to do design and development is a rarity. So this will place a burden on many who see themselves as designers.

My Notes from David Poteet’s workshop**

1. Give them what they want.
   1. “people come to your web site running”
   2. what are you audience’s key goals.
      1. decide what is important.
      2. take away choices where i do not need them.
      3. make choices clear & distinct.
   3. how do you know what they’re looking for?
      1. listen to them.
         1. interviews & focus groups.
         2. social media sites, blogs, forums.
         3. search logs.
         4. mental models.
         5. carewords survey.
         6. KJ Session.
2. Use words that smell like goals.
   1. Readers are like bees
      1. • people hunt for information like bees seeking nectar or hounds on the trail of a fox.
      2. “Scent” or “Trigger” words
         1. What worlds would be in someone’s mind if they were pursuing a particular goal?
      • information Scent Theory
   2. What they don’t do
      1. read left to right, top to bottom.
      2. look at all the options and choose the best one.
      3. Instead, they SCAN and SATISFICE.
   3. Write for scent
      1. each link needs to have a strong “scent for the content that lies beyond it.”
      2. 5-7 words are optimal.
      3. Users expect each click to lead to information that is more specific.
      4. when users click on triggers words, they expect to see those words on the next page.
      5. Don’t let clever kill clear. Trigger words need to be readily understandable
      6. Users search when they can’t find the words on the page.
   4. Am I in the right place? Are your credible?, where can i go from here?
3. Write “visually.”
   1. Do they ever read?
      1. yes, when they get to the content they’re looking for.
      2. % of the story read by format:
         1. 75% o
   2. Shorter sentences and short paragraphs
      1. in most cases not more than 50 words per paragraph
      2. one sentence paragraph is ok
      3. So are fragments.
   3. Lots of headings/sub headings.
   4. Using Images
      1. User pictures that mean something on context
      2. Use icons if meaningful.
   5. Meet users’ expectations for visual formats, for example:
      1. address
      2. game stores
   6. Use lists
   7. Use tables. collage mural
      1. data compare
      2. cross reference
      3. options
4. Show don’t tell.
   1. give sensory details and substantive facts.
   2. let them come to their own conclusions.
   3. They’ll realize it with greater conviction.
5. Not everyone thinks like you.
   1. Write for temperaments
      1. four temperaments
      2. Guardian(sj) idealist(nf), artisan(sp), rational(nt)
      3. Methodical, humanistic, spontaneous, competitive.
   2. Methodical
      1. details
      2. fine print
      3. how does it work
   3. spontaneous
      1. quickly
      2. superior
      3. customize your product/service
      4. narrow your choice
      5. enjoy life more?
   4. Humanistic
      1. How will the product make you feel
      2. who uses your product service
      3. who are you, let me see bios
      4. what will it feel like to work with you
      5. what experience other have with you?
      6. Can I trust you?
      7. What are you values?
      8. How will this help me strengthen relationships?
   5. Competitive
      1. What are you competitive advantages?
      2. Why are you superior choice.
6. Say something they’ll remember (and care about)
   1. Left Brain vs Right Brain
      • logical vs intuitive
      • Sequential vs Chaotic
      • Objective vs Subjective
      • Analytical vs Holistic
      • Right or Wrong vs Likes or Dislikes.
      • Grammar & Vocabulary vs Intonation & Accentuation
      • Exact Numeric Computation vs Approximates, Estimates
      • Tempo, tone, & interval vs Music
   2. Implications
      1. Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speak the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts of the people.
      2. Keys to the emerald city
         1. storytelling
         2. the unexpected
         3. verbs
         4. poetic meter
         5. humor
         6. leave something to the imagination
      3. Storytelling
         1. we are hardwired to remember stories.
         2. Adrenaline is the biochemical adhesive that turns short term memories into long-term memories.
         3. Stores are a great way to both SHOW an idea and engage the reader mentally and emotionally, resulting in:
            1. transfer to long-term memory.
            2. Persuasion / conviction that something is true.
            3. motivation to act
         4. Who is your story about?
         5. simple
         6. unexpected
         7. concrete
         8. credible
         9. emotional
         10. stories
             1. the sooner you can put a verb in the better.
             2. put words to music.
                1. music enters through Right Brain, bypassing Broca entirely.
                2. Poetry allows us to put music to words in our minds.
         11. What do you remember?

Conference season is on its way, as I am writing this RailsConf09 is taking place in Vegas. And the people who brought us RubyFringe will try to repeat their success with this year’s conference called FutureRuby. The conference will be taking place in Toronto, CA July 9-12th, 2009.

From OSC, Youssef Chaker will be attending. So if you are interested in attending…

…sign up fast, early bird tickets sold out in 5 hours. And be sure to introduce yourself to Youssef.

Ruby DCamp is the first conference, of any type related to ruby or my recent work with Ruby on Rails, I have attended since graduating from UVa. I have been awaiting this opportunity for a while now because my colleagues at OSC have been raving about the kind of people that will be present. People like Rich Kilmer, Brian Marick, Jeremy McAnally, Lucas Cioffi, David James and many more. Being new to the Ruby community, it is very important to meet the people who are responsible for the development of the Ruby ecosystem.

It was very convenient that the first topic that we discussed on the first day of the conference was the Ruby ecosystem. One of the key points that I got from that discussion was how people got introduced to Ruby through different ways and different circumstances but the majority got in through Rails. But a consensus between the “expert Rubyists” was summed up by one of them in the sentence “Came in for Rails, stayed for Ruby” which indicates that although Rails is the reason why people start learning Ruby, it is in itself not as appealing as Ruby is. This is why during one of the discussions we had, people were interested to find out more about the different technologies out there that leverage Ruby and give the developer the same functionality as Rails such as Merb. It was really cool to get the input of the people at the conference on their experiences with the language and the community itself.

There were two interesting things I want to mention specifically from the first day. The first one is that I found out that I am not as much a beginner as I thought myself to be.  I came to this conclusion from the Beginner Talk discussion I listened in on. During that talk, a few people who have been working with Ruby for a long time and one of them even teaching it were giving an outline of the language and mentioning things to look out for. Surprisingly enough, I already had experience with all that stuff unlike a few others who have a lot of experience with other programming languages but are new to Ruby. This was interesting to me because I came in thinking that I was the least knowledgeable person attending RubyDCamp in terms of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but that was not true (much to my relief). The other thing would have to be the fact of how smart some of the Rubyest at the conference are. I heard all about it from my coworkers but I had to see it for myself to believe it and it was very apparent the moment I observed those people planning to patch ruby gems to add a functionality they figured to be important. This was not just it, as people were mentioning ideas of what needs to be done, one person in particular was already done implementing some things and the best part was how he had it all done before everyone even reached a consensus about it.

Saturday was great in the sense where I got to meet a bunch of new people and get an idea of what kind of projects everyone is working on. Sunday on the other hand was great to get into more detail. The first session I attended was titled “CouchDB hack session” and as the title indicates, it was a session focused on CouchDB. I think it was the most popular session of the morning because there were a lot of talks about it during the first day but most of the people had no idea what it was. It was a good session with a lot of discussion about CouchDB and its uses.

The next session I sat through was a session about SproutCore. I already had an idea of what SproutCore is because I had considered using it to develop one my apps, but ended up not using it. So it was interesting for me to get the perspective of someone who had already used it and also contributed to it. What distinguishes SproutCore is how it is modeled on Rails and allows the developer to use Ruby in development but then generate JavaScript and Json to be deployed once the application is done. This allows developers to keep using Ruby even in environments that limit them such as developing an application for OpenSocial. The main thing I got from this session was some sort of validation that SproutCore is a technology that can be trusted and used, which is a fear that I had because I did not want to develop an application using a new technology that will not be supported in the future, but I learned from the conference that Apple used SproutCore for their MobileMe application and also contributed to the project. This gives me some sort of relief that it will be around in the next few years.

At lunch we started sharing our “ruby experiences” and our “favorite tools” and here’s some of those tools: git-bisect, limelight, hpricot, mechanize, jruby… So if you haven’t heard of these tools before, make sure you do your research!

Oh… and one more thing that I should mention: We at OSC need to do a bit more pair programing!

All in all, it was a great conference and special thanks to Evan Light for organizing the event. Hopefully we will be able to build on this to grow and improve the Ruby community.

Ruby DCamp is around the corner, and Youssef will be representing OSC at the event.

The event details are:

What: Ruby DCamp
When: Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 09:00 am to Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 05:30 pm
Where: Holiday Inn, Arlington
4610 Fairfax Dr
Arlington, VA 22203

For more event details, visit the event page: http://rubydcamp.eventbrite.com.

Hope to see you there!