December 2007
10 posts
2 tags
short form notes
I sometimes wonder how other people write: how they pull together disparate ideas, how they form their direction on a subject, if they too sometimes start off with an idea in mind but then after working things through change direction.
I have always been a short form writer, and my tendency in text is to edit and edit and edit. This has always been of slight amusement - potentially only to myself...
3 tags
tales from the scrum
Andrew Hedges, UI developer from Vianet.travel, ran a session about a project management method for agile software development called Scrum.
Scrum features:
self-organising, cross-functional teams and team members
product backlog of prioritised work
sprints of approx 2 week long phases/iterations
features are called “user stories” (I like this terminology)
daily check-ins and catch-up: what...
3 tags
credit where credit is due
The first presentation I attended was Che Tamahori’s - he spoke about giving credit where credit is due on the web, while babysitting his youngest at the same time.
How do we credit people’s contributions to projects - freelancers, peer recognition, and even just portfolios. There are frameworks for other industries whether it’s awards or Admedia type listings…but how do we fit this together for...
3 tags
spaghetti or meatball?
Mat Allen designed the awesome tshirts everyone got today and was kind enough to explain what he was thinking, so I was keen to see how that had all come together. There is a lot of conversation about spaghetti VERSUS meatball concepts that Mata put together, but I’ve kind of used these terms as a way to describe elements of his design. (Confidential to Mat: if you hate it, tell me how to describe...
3 tags
charles
The second afternoon session I attended was about Charles, run by Karl von Randow.
Charles is a proxy which sits between your browser and the internet - you can see all the communication between websites like Twitter and Twitter apps like Twitterific. It does a whole lot of things in that space to make development a lot easier - especially for Flash developers. It has been in development for 7...
3 tags
barcamp round-up
The inaugural Auckland BarCamp was organised by Ludwig Wendzich, a 16 year old high school student. I really admire him for getting on and sorting it out (which none of us had done as professionals in the industry).
I attended five sessions & the final session was a demo/short intro full of quick introductions to several subjects, such as the eee laptop and Mukuna’s gig guide by text. I also...
4 tags
diy css frameworks
Darren Wood’s presentation was posed as a conversation on CSS design patterns. Frameworks have been around for awhile but one hit the scene & everyone went “mental”. Blueprint was the one which started the fire - CSS files which are useful for a basis.
CSS frameworks are supposed to make things easier - however, Darren feels it’s not that useful for people building commercial web apps because...
3 tags
webstock photo exhibition
In the original Webstock line-up, Heather Champ and Derek Powazek were going to lead a photo workshop. They aren’t able to make it to Webstock anymore, but we’re going to have a photo exhibition and walkabout day anyway. Photos will be displayed digitally at the conference venue and archived online as a set.
The theme of the photo exhibition is FREEDOM. Interpret it how you like, but the basis of...
2 tags
i work on the web
It’s been far too long in coming, but I finally wrote & added my iworkontheweb.com profile. Do yours now - it’s super easy, especially if you already have a Flickr account. Go on. . . . (Have you done it yet?)
2 tags
email standards project
If you’re not blind or deaf, you’ve heard about the new Email Standards Project, which has been set-up by the guys who run Campaign Monitor.
At first I discounted the value of such a project as I have often thought that HTML email sucks: it’s hard to make look consistent, so often it’s just a massive image and I think they’re often badly designed and targetted. However, they are super useful when...