Here we go for a little round-up of the sessions I attended today...

Doc Searls delivered a very entertaining keynote covering a very wide spectrum of issues ranging from the transformation of vocabulary to free speech. The bottom line was: get up now and stand up for your rights!

Robert Scobble made a terrific job at putting everyone back to sleep. After being introduced by the host with the famous "Microsoft has no taste" Jobs quote, he tried to play it cool with a live IRC feed running on the big screen. But this presentation was plain boring: did anyone in the audience really needed an explanation of what blogs and PageRank are all about? Please, this was no Visual Basic Developers conference...

Michael Heilemann's lessons from the Kubrick template was a talk on open source design. The session was actually a bit like the template itself: not really bad but nothing groundbreaking neither.

Dina Mehta gave an uplifting talk about the rise of social and collaborative software (the combined use of Blogs, Wikis, VoIP, mobile messaging, ...) in India in the perspective of the crisis management and business development.

Ben Cerveny's presentation about games as dynamic systems model was thought provoking but maybe a bit too fast-paced at some points. I don't if it's because he was anticipating the lunch break that much or if my brain was just too slow.
Citing Nintendo as an example, Ben said that as games are getting closer to reality, the subsequent player boredom will leave even more room for abstraction and surrealism just like when photography 'killed' painting. He also gave some interesting insight about the collision - which is bound to happen - between virtual and real economies.

Jimbo Wales told the audience about the wisdom of Wikipedia and other projects from the Wikimedia Foundation. Some pretty interesting figures were shown regarding the demographics of Wikipedia editors and Wales also provided some explanation about the associated quality insurance and community processes. A very good example of how a loose system managed with a flexible policy can end up producing quality.

I was a bit disapointed by the talk about Goal-oriented and Persona-based design as the resulting overall process seems very linear and doesn't leave a lot of space for client interaction. There were some interesting ideas which could be especially useful when designing task-oriented user interfaces but I think I'll stick to the wireframe and mock-up iterative design approach.

Jason Fried of the 37signals & Basecamp fame delivered a really brilliant speech about building successful projects with small teams. Here are some random notes I took:

  • Small teams is about less for more.
  • Get rid middle/muddle managers to avoid distortion and put everyone on the frontline
  • Go for the simplest solution to lower the cost of change
  • Say no by default and let features remind themselves
  • Don't add, think about improving first
  • Every decision is temporary
  • Get your software out of the way of the user
  • Functional specs are political documents aimed at blaming people
  • No problem till it's a problem
  • Big design upfront Vs Making decisions when you have real information

Too bad, I still can't see how that kind of attitude can work with small teams embedded in larger structures ridden with system dependencies, politics, ass-guarding, job protection and fear.

David Heinemeier Hansson's Ruby on Rails talk was a nice explanation of the origins and design philosophy behind the best web development framework to date. Some of the highlights:

  • Being quick without getting dirty
  • Be it PHP or Java, it's not fun to keep fighting a language or an environment. Most programmers are not happy because they have to deal with harassing technology
  • Investment to get started is key to success
  • No academic aspirations, Rails is no revolution: patterns deja-vu (MVC, ORM, ...), shared-nothing architecture (PHP-like), familiar open-source foundations (Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL).
  • Old ideas, new context: Taking a good idea in Java to make it a great idea with Ruby.
  • Convention over Configuration: optimize the common case. It's a trade-off, flexibility doesn't mean that everything should be equally hard.
  • Choice is overrated especially in programming stack, flexibility is not free. Apple gets this. Trade some flexibility to earn a lot of productivity in return.
  • Languages of love, platforms of passion. Unlike Java, assume competence; Attract programmers caring for the craft; Motivation determines productivity. Programmers who shoot themselves in the foot with the gun the (dynamic) language offer them would be bad programmers in any language anyway.
  • Ruby on Rails is the sum of all its parts and the philosophy around it
  • Culture clash with 'Enterprise Developers' (That won't scale! But is it mature! Nobody ever got fired for...). Java people just say what C++ folks said when Java came out.
  • Ruby on Rails just steal the ideas from the 'smart guys' and give them to all those 'green programers' to play with
  • Bottomline: no single, big innovation

This conclude my report of the first day of Reboot!