A quick run through the talks from DIBI '12, as much to remind myself later as to inform the masses. You'll find links to all the speakers on the dibi site at https://www.dibiconference.com/schedule/ until I get time to come back and slot them in. I jumped tracks a few times – why don't you play 'guess the track' basd on the description.
Seb Lee-Delisle, 'Design it and build it'
This was a great talk – really upbeat, enthusiastic, and I would imagine most of us left with a feeling we should really play a bit more with 'visual stuff' built with code.
He live coded a javascript particle emitter on stage – piece by piece – to show the 'designers that don't code' how easy it is. Before that he'd used a C64 emulator to create generative art. Great stuff. Reminded me of the old days of drawing line patterns on the speccy to get weird moire patterns wiggling about on the screen. Speccy for loops ftw!
Takeaway – the journey informs the destination – just get stuck in
The 2 Pauls, 'the challenges of designing for everyone – revolutionising the UK government online'
I should really have gone to the node.js talk on the other track – but this is really interesting stuff. The talk centred on a review of the key design principles of the project – with examples of how they are applied. Some of the comparisons of the 'old way' and the new interpretation are properly impressive. I love the thinking behind most of this. To hear government talking about MVP, RWD, Agile etc… is pretty exciting actually. If you haven't been already, have a rummage around https://www.gov.uk/
Takeaway – user test user test user test
Brian LeRoux, 'Mobile web programming is a bloody mess!'
This was a good run through of the landscape for mobile, and background on phone gap. Brian obviously knows his hardcore JS and I got a lot out of this one – one of the more practical talks.
Takeaway – mobile is hard, but debug tools are here and they work so stop wining
Chris Mills and Bruce Lawson, 'The DIBI Panto'
That's not the actual name of the talk – but it may as well have been. Costumes, sound effects, boos from the audience. Banging the drum for standards, accessibility and feature detection. Nothing particularly new for me – but a good fun presentation.
Takeaway – funny is good
Ted Roden, 'Going Solo'
Ted has a pretty brutal, focussed, down to earth view of the 'startup landscape'. And his view is from a distant hill. His approach to releasing features – don't start something you can't ship today – makes me happy. I'm not sure why – it just does. I'm kind of annoyed this clashed with Paul Boag – who I'd also like to have seen – but I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Great talk.
Takeaway – 'it ships today'
Scott Rutherford, 'Failing up'
This wasa really interesting run through of the birth and toddler years of User Voice. Some funny stuff, and some really interesting stuff about how to deal with software / hardware fails in the face of customer demand.
Takeaway – react quickly and openly when stuff goes wrong
Cameron Moll, 'The burden of being creative'
Cameron did some of his presentation live using the Paper ipad app to draw his slides. It was an interesting approach, but slowed things up in a few places. I was impressed with his penmanship, the standard pen in Paper is a nightmare to write with.
Cameron built up an equation to define creativity. I'm not sure I agree with his final equation – but I like the idea of demystifying creativity in this way.
Overall
So Seb gave the most awesome/brilliant (delete as applicable) talk, and Ted gave the best takeaway (it ships today). The workshop on Monday was great fun, and the conference day flew by. The beef noodles for lunch were tasty, and the pizza at night appreciated. I even got a 5am Saint in.
DIBI is a great conference – you should definitely go next year.
Now, I'm off to write some generative javascript art to be seeded by some arduino interactive tinfoil fuzzy connections through the analog inputs to run through a node.js back end, sync'd onto every screen in the house. Should be fun.
Steven Milne 