Speakers | dConstruct 2010

Speakers | dConstruct 2010.

This was a fun presentation to listen to and I think Merlin makes some great points throughout.  I loved his comments about how nerds aren’t doing what they do for the money.  To paraphrase one portion:

If you give a painter a bunch of money to not paint any more they won’t be happy because they have money.  What makes them happy it to paint

This is spot on and describes well this idea that jobs that require creative thought generally can’t be done better by throwing money at it.  There are other things that you can give those “creatives” that can have a bigger impact.  I’m not saying that money isn’t important.  What I am saying is that there is a point at which more money isn’t doing anything good.  Pay enough to take the issue of money off the table.

If you can give the “creatives” autonomy and control to do what they think is best you’ll have happier developers and designers, and I guarantee happier customers to.

Merlin also talks about looking to the horizon and preparing yourself for what is coming next.  He encourages “nerds” to always keep looking ahead and try to avoid getting stuck the the rut of what you think is great right now.

Here’s what I see on my horizon:

Rails is great, but the time of server side is transitioning to client side.  This has been a while in coming but I believe that Javascript will be the primary language web developers are using and only secondarily their server side language of choice.  I’ve been eyeing this space for a while know and it’s only getting riper for the change.

If you are a math nerd start brushing up on your statistics and big data.  We’ve figured out how to collect huge sums of data, but only in the last few years have we really started understanding scalable and flexible ways to process that data out side of academia.  I’ve heard this elsewhere and I’ll echo it here: Statisticians will be driving the next generation of crazy cool apps.  It’s already starting especially around the twitter api, and it’s going to grow even more.

Fun times!!

A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko

A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko.

This idea of a simple query language that actually is geared towards normal people is interesting.  SQL was supposed to be that way back when, but no one today would ever claim that a search engine that exposed SQL to users would be better for the masses.  But a simpler version could have some really awesome broad impact in other areas.  As people become more comfortable using semi-structured queries we can use them in our own web apps without extensive education or making them “advanced features”.  I don’t know if Blekko can succeed, but if they can I think the web will benefit in some interesting ways.

HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph | Alex Kessinger

HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph | Alex Kessinger.

Amen.

Google Wave: why we didn’t use it

Google Wave: why we didn’t use it.

I really am disappointed that Google Wave has failed.  I think the Ars article does a good job of summarizing why it didn’t really take off despite the best press you could ask for not to mention Google backing it.

I’m still hopeful that the underlaying protocol can still be salvaged in some alternate clients.  It really would be interesting to see it reanimated in a different form by someone else.  Even if it were just added as a new account type in Mail.app or iChat and literally only provided feature parity with that tool initially, that might be a more logical progression to introducing what should be a more powerful and flexible communication protocol.  This will also give users a better understood starting point and we can more gradually figure out what people what to be able to do and how they want to do it along the way.  The fully baked solution the Google’s implementation provided really didn’t enjoy much user feedback to influence its development until way too late in the process.

Hoptoad and Javascript, Sitting in a Tree, S-E-N-D-I-N-G – GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS

Hoptoad and Javascript, Sitting in a Tree, S-E-N-D-I-N-G – GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS.

I’m really excited about this new feature of HopToad.  I’ve played around with ExceptionHub but it was missing some important features like team management.  Leveraging HopToad to do this kind of JavaScript/browser level error tracking really cleanly combines two useful and similar tools for debugging a running system.

I should add that I echo the concerns of some of the commenters on the linked to blog post about security concerns.  It would be helpful if ThoughtBot followed this up with a post to address this concern in a bit more detail.

All in all though, this is nice

JustinFrench.com: Pagination Alternatives

JustinFrench.com: Pagination Alternatives.

Great description of some of the deficiencies of pagination as well as a number things to think about when presenting large quantities of data to users.