Another day, another geek meet, this time in the sunny seaside paradise of Brighton, UK. This is a great place for a tech conference, as it is close to London, plus Brighton is a hive of activity for talented IT people. We have so many authors from Brighton! Andy Budd and Richard Rutter from Clearleft organize d.Construct, and they’ve both written for me, of course!

d.Construct 2006 was nothing short of excellent—great speakers and topics, great organization, and a good opportunity to further spread the good name of foED! We had a bookstore as well, and sold a very respectable number of books—a great success for us.

I’d like to say thanks to Andy and Rich for letting us be a part of it, Martin Hearn and Andrew Bentley-Steed from Methven’s bookstore (also check out www.samedaybooks.co.uk/) for coming along and helping us with the book selling, and everyone I talked to, new friends or old.

Thursday

It was an enjoyable journey down—I seem to spend every train ride down to a geek conference in or near London learning more about Ruby on Rails and drinking beer. I met Pat Lauke in London Victoria, and spent the last leg of the journey catching up—we worked out that we’d both been on the same train from Manchester to London as well - d’oh

I got to the hotel at about 7pm, and managed to get into my room after a bit of a fiasco involved with paying for the room…but nothing too serious! I then dined on sushi, and had a shower, as I smelt like a dead dog after 5 hours of travel in the hot sun.

Then I went to the party, and got on with the socializing! Met up with some great people, like William Lawrence, Jen Hanen, Pat Griffiths, Paul Duncan, Ian Lloyd, Jon Hicks, PPK, Paul Boag, Gareth Rushgrove…and more.

Pete, the other friend of ED, turned up at about 9.30 or so. We drank a fair bit before the posse from the speakers dinner turned up a while later—Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Drew McLellan, Rachel Andrew, Derek Featherstone, and Aral Balkan. It was really cool to have Aral there—the first time I’ve ever seen the Flash and Web Standards world cross over (it’s also happening at Flash on the Beach, where Jeremy is speaking.) It seems long overdue for the two sides to start converging somewhat.

At the end of the night after closing time, a big group of us wandered around for quite a while looking for more beer. Luckily, we didn’t find any—I was hung over on Friday as it is!

Friday

7.30am - time to get going to the venue and set up the book table—nuts! Tea was my savior!
We got to the venue at about 8am, with Pete’s car stuffed full of books—the bookstore guys were right on time, and very efficient—we got the book table set up in no time. Then came breakfast—bacon was my 2nd savior of the day. Finding a bacon sandwich in Brighton is a feat indeed…

The first book sold was Christian Heilmann’s Beginning JavaScript book, and Christian turned up a few moments later to say hi—talk about timing. Dave Sussman then came over to talk to us about a future event he is helping run, which sounds interesting. It was also kinda funny to see him again—a face from my old former life as a Wrox editor! The time I edited one of his books was probably about 5 years ago! I also met Dave Child too, and had a good chat.

So, it was on to the talks, after a few words from both Richard Rutter, who was compere for the day, and Glenn Jones from Madgex, the main sponsor of the day.

“Web services: fuelling innovation and entrepreneurship” by Jeff Barr

This basically involved Jeff, Amazon web services evangelist, giving the attendees a sales pitch on Amazon web services…but they are pretty damn cool—very impressive stuff! And it set the tone of the day quite nicely—web services and APIs featured pretty heavily at this conference, along with Ajax, Mash-ups, and a smattering of Web 2.0 sorbet. It was nice to see that they were running Jeremy’s buzzword bingo again!

Amazon definitely has impressive statistics—59 million active user accounts, and 25 terabytes of sales data, and 1 million active seller accounts. But they don’t just do retail—they provide services for developers too—180,000 developers have signed up to develop their own applications with Amazon services.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) are a set of APIs and business models giving these developers access to Amazon technology and content. Jeff divided the different services up into 4 sections—Ecommerce, Infrastructure, web, and workforce and workflow:

Ecommerce included the Amazon eCommerce Service (ECS,) which allows you to set up a shop infrastructure, including connecting to the Amazon affiliates program to make you more money, and Historical Pricing, allowing you to pull up data on how products have performed in the past, in terms of Amazon rankings and reviews.

Examples shown that use the ECS are TV Mojo, Honeycomb Technology, and Live Plasma.

Infrastructure included the Alexa Web Information Service, Top Sites, Thumbnails, Web Search Platform—basically lots of different ways of pulling up useful information.

Web included the Amazon simple queue service, Simple Storage Service (S3,) and Elastic Compute Cloud. The last two are the most interesting—they allow you to pay for site storage space, and extra processing power. When you have a bit operation to deal with and you need more, you can turn up the dial to use a bit more for a while. There is a huge cluster of Amazon computers available for you to hire to do large amounts of data processing.

Smug Mug, Ookles, and Chicago Crime all use S3.

In workforce and workflow, there was one item—the Amazon Mechanical Turk. This struck me as a great idea—if you have a problem where by you need a question answered, or work done, you can use the Mechanical Turk API to get in contact with people who can fulfill your needs.

“Web services for fun and profit” by Simon Willison and Paul Hammond

I didn’t sit in on this talk unfortunately, as I was feeling pretty claustrophobic after the first talk, due to my rather prodigious height, and the tiny seats. But I could hear a lot of it from the comfort of the exhibit area. It included a lot of stuff about the Yahoo Developer Network stuff, funnily enough, with some good tips on how developers can make real world use of APIs/web services to solve technical problems in their day to day work.

“The joy of API” by Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith started off with a fairly lighthearted waffly beginning, reminiscing about when he first started on the web, his first web site, etc…aww! He then went on to talk about lots of different API/mash-up ideas, involving Flickr, Google, etc. As you will probably guess from my incredibly detailed notes on this one, I didn’t sit in on this one either, as I was busy manning the bookstall.

Around lunchtime, we had a good talk to John Davey, one of the organizers of Flash on the beach. That conference will be very positive for us, I am sure of it!

Mash my Flex up, by Aral Balkan

Aral’s talk was very entertaining. He is a very lively, animated speaker; you wouldn’t believe that he has a background in acting/theater His first comment was “don’t shoot me - I’m a Flash developer”, and he then went on to talk about how the rift between Flashies and Web Standardistas has definitely been fixed somewhat.

He told us about himself, and the things that excite him in his work, including agile development, extreme programming, user-centered design and development, design patterns, and software architecture. It is interesting to see how these kinds of techniques can be applied in the Flash world, for example in his open source ARP flash framework.

He then looked at APIs and Mash-ups, what they are, really. Mash-ups take content and services and present them differently, to solve a specific problem. The most common Mash-ups involve searches, maps, and photos. But how open are they? Aral says not as open as you might think. There are API restrictions in place such as no commercial use allowed, a developer ID being required to use them, non-compete clauses saying you’re not allowed to build products that compete with products already in existence. And what agenda do the companies that make them available really have? Are they a new wave of marketing, recruitment, or syndication?

Playing with APIs is really good fun though. When developing a mash-up, or open source software, you are basically building something to scratch an itch—to solve a problem that you can’t currently find an answer to.

He then brought the discussion over to Flash—APIs are semi-open, just like the SWF format. Open source Flash is already very popular, and will continue to grow. Maybe Flash will be properly open sourced one day? It’s quite a realistic possibility. Flex was introduced at this point. It was great to see a talk on Flex here—one of the most important and groundbreaking technologies, in my opinion.

Next, some cool Flex examples, such as Homelocator, Flex SQL Admin, and Onyx Video Mixer. These kinds of application are fairly easy to do in Flex, as it is a markup language interspersed with some ActionScript 3 for logic etc. And Flash Player 9 is much faster than older versions, meaning that the applications are a lot more effective.

Next came some more examples—he showed the open source Flash-based Commodore 64 emulator, and he then showed a Flash-based mash-up of Amazon and the NYC public library from Amit Gupta, because he was sick of constantly flicking back and forth between the two sites to compare book data! I’d like to thank Aral for giving our ActionScript Animation book a huge plug at this point in the talk! He also showed Flex Style Explorer, which is a cool little app for showing off some of Flex’s presentational power.

So how easy is it to do Flex Mash-ups? Easy is the answer. Flex can consume data in many different formats, including SOAP, JSON, XML-RPC, and of course Flash remoting. To demonstrate how easy it is, he showed how to build a simple app that consumes a Flickr feed and displays photos and their captions in Flex. A very enjoyable talk.

Accessible web applications in a post web 1.0 world, by Derek Featherstone.

This was unfortunately another talk that I didn’t see much of due to book table duties. But it was very well received, and very appropriate for the current web climate. People are getting much more turned on to accessibility, but the next challenge is dealing with Accessible Ajax/DOM Scripted sites, as they have their own sets of accessibility issues. Derek looked at how users with disabilities can be expected to fare on sites like this; how their assistive technologies cope with Ajax type stuff (pretty badly, but it is getting better as technologies and development practices improve.) after setting the ground work, he shared some of his ideas about how to build a strategy for developing Web 2.0 sites that are more accessible to all users.

Folksonomy - tagging that works, by Thomas Vander Wal

Again, I didn’t see this one due to book table duties, but it was another very valid talk, on how tagging can be used effectively, to improve information use in the applications we build.

Designing the Complete User Experience, by Jeffrey Veen

In my reckoning, this tied with Aral’s talk for my favorite talk of the day. Jeff is such a great speaker, I could just listen to him for hours. He is just so spot on about user-centered design, effective application design strategies, usability, etc. In fact, I didn’t really get much in the way of notes! But he has made the presentation slides available on a Creative Commons license at veen.com/dconstruct2006.pdf.

His talk kind of connected everything earlier in the day together. The other talks gave technical implementation details—the “How” of web development. Jeff Veen talked about the “Why” of web development—remembering our customers, and how to give them the services they want effectively. How to find out what they want, how to plan how to deliver it to them, how to keep your sites extensible for future changes to customer base or need. He got in lots of amusing anecdotes, made fun of Jakob Nielsen and Microsoft, and was finished in time for tea. Flawless!

The wrap up

At the end of the day, closing remarks were made, some prizes were given out, including some bundles of our books, and there was also a last minute rush of book sales, which was nice. Then to round it off, Paul Boag grabbed me to do an interview for his web development podcast. He asked me what I thought of the day, and asked me what was coming up in our publication plan, giving me ample opportunity to plug our books!

Friday Evening

The evening was truly entertaining—Pete and myself went for some food first of all. I had some whitebait, followed by the biggest bowl full of Mussels I have ever seen—I didn’t leave much room for beer! It was time for Pete to go home, so we said our goodbyes, and then I wandered over to the end of event party. I met up with Norm, Jeremy, Jessica, and a few others outside the party, where we discussed a number of things, including the fact that Brighton sea food isn’t as good as I thought it was. Then I wandered inside, and was greeted with the usual drunken geek chaos that these types of event tend to involve.

I had lots of good conversations with Dave Child, Christian, Niqui Merret, Aral, Derek, Sheila Farrell and a host of others. At one point, I also talked to a couple of really enthusiastic young guys about their web development stuff for ages - one of them is a huge foED fan, and has a bookshelf full of pink! He bought me Tequila. Thanks man - keep in touch!

After the party had died down somewhat, we made the incredibly wise move of going back to the guesthouse where the speakers were staying to drink cocktails until the early hours. I can remember chatting to Brothercake for ages, and Glenn Jones. Derek was a rock and roll superhero. I went home at about 3am. I think.

Saturday

Saturday moved slowly—really slowly…it was brilliant! I lead such a hectic life normally, with all my work projects, family time, and musical endeavors, that I hardly ever get time to just chill and move slowly. But this was my day. I took a really leisurely stroll around the North Lane district and did some great shopping, and then went to a coffee shop on the seafront and met up with all the usual suspects. I had an interesting talk to Thomas Caspers and Pat Lauke about accessibility, and a cool chat to Pat’s other half about (aaargh, I’m terrible with names!) sound design, and other slightly geeky, but non-web-geeky, and very interesting, things. I found that Guinness and Ice Cream made an ideal post conference lunch (not in the same glass/bowl though.)

Then 3pm came round, and it was goodbye Brighton. Damn I like Brighton. I wish it wasn’t so far away from Manchester!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 9:37 am and is filed under Shows, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.