craigAgreen.com

I had great expectations for this day. I didn't attend expecting that I would learn how to program in within a 50 minute presentation. I can do that on my own time from the comfort of my home. I came expecting to be inspired. I wanted to see things that I don't normally see in my day-to-day work. I wanted to leave all fired up and ready to make a difference in the world (ok, at least in MY world :) ). Did it deliver? Kind of.

Joel's keynote hit the mark. It's something that all (most) developers should struggle with. How do we make something so incredibly difficult and complex appear effortless and intuitive? Elegant user interface design is something that is lacking far too many applications.

From there things went downhill. Not that the presentations/presenters were bad or didn't know their stuff. I just wasn't inspired. For example, I felt that the JQuery talk could have demonstrated how jQuery can create the worlds most intuitive UI (as an aside, Joel's demo where he added sub tasks completely via the keyboard should be how every interface works. He mentioned that they tried to make it as simple as using notepad).

 [Update: Ralph Whitbeck's jQuery talk can be found here]

Greg Wilson saved the day (slides here). His talk focused on bringing the science back to computer science. Very interesting stuff. He opened my eyes, challenged and inspired me. Thank you Greg.

[Update: Greg Wilson's talk can be found here] 

Reg Braithwaite also gave a great talk. I heard grumblings that there was little in the way of ruby. Which (in my opinion) was his point. Who cares about the language? Languages will come and languages will go. As developers we need to learn how to solve problems, programming languages are just a means to achieve that. If all you know how to use is a hammer then every problem will look like a nail. I wish I would have known a bit more about Reg before the talk. I've followed some of his projects (from a distance) in the past without realizing that he was involved. He is brilliant.

In the end it was a great day. I'll be back next year and I'll be bringing the rest of my team with