Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

Well friends, Webstock is over and it turned out to be totally awesome. It was well-planned, well-executed, and loaded with high-quality content. I had the opportunity to meet/chat with one of the organizers, Mike Brown, and he is not only an all-star conference planner, but a genuinely nice dude. There was so much awesomeness from the speakers that I'm going to split my overview into two posts: one for each day of the conference. My highlights from the presentations on Day 1 are as follows:

Jane McGonigal - Gaming Reality

First of all, Jane is just an incredibly cool person. She's fun to chat with and, quite frankly, cookies make me happy too. :) Her talk made some great points about how games really optimize human experience by appealing directly to the things that humans crave:

• having satisfying work to do
• being good at something
• spending time with people we like
• having the chance to be a part of something bigger

One of the points she made toward the end really stuck with me. She said that considering the current state of our world (climate change, sucky economy, etc.), we all need to become "game developers" and apply these things to all of the software we create. We should be thinking about how to structure user experience to make people happier, and how to develop systems that really make people awesome.

Matt Biddulph - Made of Messages

In this talk Matt discussed background processing and said that we should perform only the most basic calculations up front and show the user only what effects their world at that moment. The complex calculations can be put on a queue to be processed later. One of the things Matt mentioned really made me think. What does background processing do to interaction design? Now, I'm no designer, but I've never really thought to mention to the designer that I'm working with that some process is happening in the background and the information may not be available immediately. It seems now like something they should definitely know about in order to not mislead the user or create confusion.

Heather Champ - Shepherding Passionate Communities

Heather Champ, of Flickr, gave an insightful talk about 7 lessons she learned while managing the passionate flickr community. She had a lot of good stuff to say, but there were two that I liked best. First, Heather said that feedback has a lifecycle. The feedback you get in the first 48 hours is usually full of gut reactions to change, whereas over a 2 week period you get more thoughtful feedback. The second one I liked was this: Own your failure. If you screw up, tell your users you screwed up without making excuses. Then turn it into something fun.

Michael Lopp - Being Geek

This was a really fun talk and affirmed my suspicion that I am a total nerd/geek. But definitely not a dork. :) He talked about the cliches of being geek and what they mean about our personalities. Nerds are supposedly good with computers, obsessive, and awkward. But in actuality we just love puzzles, don't want you touching our stuff, and are always trying to figure out how people fit into our system. :)

The rest of the speakers from Day 1 were just as good: Nat Torkington, Cameron Adams, Derek Powazek, Adrian Holovaty, and the ever-hilarious Ze Frank. For the sake of keeping this less than a zillion words, I won't summarize them all, but I was truly impressed with the quality of the speakers as well as their content.

Stay tuned for thoughts on Day 2.