"The best conference I've attended in the past few years."

On the 8th September 2006 the second d.Construct conference was held in Brighton, England. The conference is described as: -

"An affordable, one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications. The event discusses how new technology is transforming the web from a document delivery system into an application platform."

England isn't known for it's sunny weather, so when I arrived in Brighton on Thursday to blazing sunshine, clear blue skies and a deep azure blue sea I knew I was in for a good couple of days.

Dave Verwer introduced me to the event a few months back because he had heard great things about the first time the event had been held - on his recommendation I registered and started planning my journey.

The event is focused at the Non-Microsoft community, with the vast majority of attendees being PHP, Java and Ruby developers as well as a whole host of non developers in the form of designers, technology officers and those whom have to work on the leading edge of Internet technologies.

As this was the first Non-Microsoft event of this nature I've ever been to I was not sure what to expect. The communities around PHP, Java and Ruby tend to be very Anti-Microsoft so I anticipated some "Microsoft Bashing" at the event from both the speakers and the attendees, I was however pleasantly surprised to discover this was not the case.

Traveling with me to Brighton was Dave Sussman, famed author and international man of mystery. As many of you will know Dave wrote the books which launched ASP and ASP.NET, he's played a pivotal role in the Microsoft Web platforms and helped millions of people learn the platforms with his writing along side Alex Homer. Dave is a Microsoft Man.

On the 7th September a "Night out" had been arranged in a Brighton pub/bar where approximately 50 conference attendees met up. This was a nice thing for the conference organizers to set up and help facilitate, it allowed the attendees to chat and relax and work out what everyone else wanted out of the event. Whilst on the Night out I discovered I was not the only Microsoft based person there, there were other .NET guys around and they had similar aims as my own, to learn what the industry as a whole is doing and see what they can take from that and apply to their own applications.

The morning of the conference was upon us, Dave Verwer, Dave Sussman and I headed up from our Hotel on the sea front to the Corn Exchange which is where the conference was being held, on arriving the doors were still closed and quite a few people were milling around outside, whilst we waited Dan Morris a friend who runs a group here in Manchester which connects geeks with other geeks and also works for the BBC joined us in waiting for the doors to be flung open; thankfully, we didn't wait too long.

On entering the Corn Exchange I was burdened with the obligatory bag of conference swag and my delegate badge. At this point I think it's important to share the contents of the bag, as with all conferences, if all the sessions are bad, at least you've gotten some free stuff to cheer you up. So inside the bag we found a Bottle of Water (very nice touch), BBC Backstage T-Shirt, a copy of .net magazine (Not Microsoft .NET but design and general non Microsoft technologies), creative commons bits (stickers, badges, DVD etc), a pen, a lighter (lord knows why) and a trial edition of Macromedia Studio 8. The only other thing I'd have liked to have had in the bag was a small notepad for use in the sessions (not everyone had laptops or PDA's). (Some of us* had our laptops but forgot to bring the power cable with them because some of us are stupid).

One of the most ingenious pieces of conference materials I've ever received at a conference was my delegate badge, it was a plastic wallet on a very nice nylon neck chord, inside the wallet was the full agenda for the day and a thank you message to all those whom had helped put the conference together. I found this agenda around my neck to be invaluable and plan to reuse this concept for any conferences I'm involved in over the coming years where possible.

I've had similar badges at TechEd but they are oversized and a pain to wear. The d.Construct badge was spot on with weight and content.

After rummaging through the deligate bags and exploring the badge we went in search of refreshments and other goodies in the expo area. There were only three stands which was interesting, and none of the big names were there. A JavaScript debugging company had one stand, madgex had another and friendsofed had the other stand (book stall full of Web 2.0 and Javascript books).

As well as the stands there was also a very long table (100 feet perhaps in length) with power sockets all along the top, this was for conference deligate's to plug their laptops in - great idea. Oh did I mention the venue also had free WiFi for all deligate's?

Basically the event was focused on helping the deligate's get the most out of the day. The Podcast which has been running for many weeks encouraged people to video and take photographs of what they want during the day, the organizers wanted people to be comfortable and they achieved this, no, they excelled at this. Even before the first session had begun it was clear to me that the day was going to be good. I was getting very excited and could not wait for the sessions to begin.

With only a single track for the entire day, choosing which sessions to attend was relatively straightforward (all of them!).

10:00 - 10:45 Jeff Barr - Amazon - Web Services: Fueling Innovation and Entrepreneurship

11:15 - 12:00 Paul Hammond & Simon Willison - Yahoo! - Web Services for fun and Profit

12:00 - 12:45 - Jeremy Keith - The Joy of API

14:00 - 14:45 - Aral Balkan - Mash my Flex up

14:45 - 15:30 - Derek Featherstone - Accessible Web Applications in a Post Web 1.0 World

16:00 - 16:45 - Thomas Vander Wal - Understanding Folksonomy (Tagging the Works)

16:45 - 17:30 - Jeffery Veen - Google - Designing the Complete User Experience

18:30 - Late - After Event Party

I don't want to drill into each session as I think what you'd get out of them depends on where you are and what you're doing with web technologies. Audio recordings of each session should appear online soon. What I will say though is that I enjoyed five of the seven and would gladly sit through them again, the two which didn't mean much to mean; they just didn't captivate me in the same way as the others.

Sitting in the conference room and turning around scared me half to death, I was surrounded by dozens of glowing apples. This really shows the loyalty of the crowd and speakers, I think all but one of the speakers also presented with Mac notebooks.

You would be mistaken for thinking this was a deeply technical conference because of the agenda, however you could not be further from the truth. The conference was an ideas conference, one where you come away thinking about what's been said as opposed to implementing it.

The sessions were not aimed at teaching the delegates technologies but rather philosophies of web design and web technologies (how Web 2.0 do I sound ... I'm making myself feel slightly nauseous here). As the conference had a very different intention from others I've attended I believe that I actually took more away from d.Construct than I have taken from any other conference ever.

I can't sing the praises enough of the event, as a Microsoft technologist I fully expected to feel isolated and excluded from the sessions and breaks, this just wasn't the case, I came away with so much, met new people, got to explore new areas and experienced a great day. I will be at next years event. It was fantastic. I hope you will also be there.

* Yes it was me. I am the stupid one.

Brighton was basking in glorious sunshine. We entered a dark theatre.

Amazon's 'Web Services Evangelist' Jeff Barr certainly lived up to his title with an articulate sales pitch of Amazon's Web Service APIs. This was an interesting overview of some pretty exciting tools (S3, Mechanical Turk) which Amazon are offering, and I can see the huge appeal it offers to start-ups, but I was disappointed at seeing what felt a bit like a corporate advertisement being top-billed at a 'grassroots' event.

Perhaps I got out of bed too early?

Or perhaps not. Next up - Yahoo! The affable Simon Willison and Paul Hammond described how Yahoo! were the biggest site in the world (200 million registered users - that's, like, 1 in every 30 people on the planet!), how Yahoo! have acquired some of the biggest start-ups in recent years (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming), and then they focused on Yahoo!'s public APIs and how Yahoo! use them internally to create new products such as Yahoo! Tech. I liked the sound of the internal Yahoo! code jam day (can't remember the exact title) and I appreciate that these technologies and APIs are pretty spectacular, but again this disappointing from a grassroots level.

Next, co-host Jeremy Keith presented a tech-free introduction to the most popular of these public APIs, notable Google Maps, Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming). Picture of Victoria Palace Pier from Brighton Beach

Jeremy is a good speaker, comfortable on the stage (does this come from his musicianship? Tell us more about that JK) and this was succinct, amusing and to the point. He kindly offered free sarnies at his 'Microformats picnic' in the park which I'd like to have attended, but I just had to go to the greatest breakfast/lunch venue on earth.

Although given the graveyard shift, Aral Balkan stole the show with his presentation. Aral is an enthusiastic, energetic presenter and I loved this. I've been keeping a keen eye on Flash in recent years and it now seems that some really exiting and groundbreaking things are starting to happen. Aral was focusing on Flex 2 which I'm immediately going to read up about and play around with. The Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2 IDE looks excellent (if expensive for a tool which primarily consists of open source internals) and ActionScript is now a pretty mature language. Aral's work with osflash.org is excellent and I'm looking forward to developments in that area. Being a developer I really wanted him to go into more detail about his Agile approach and how he uses XP (can you, for example, unit test your ActionScript?), but d.construct probably wasn't the right platform for that. If you missed it, you can view Aral's presentation (in Flash format, naturally) on the web.

In Web Applications in a Post 1.0 World, Derek Featherstone took us through the real-world problems which AJAX-enabled sites have with web accessibility. This was very interesting and I was actually rather surprised to find that today's screen-readers can cope admirably with such sites (for some reason I thought it would be much more problematic for them). The problem is primarily down to developers not spending enough time thinking about accessibility when coding their sites. There's still a long way to go but Derek's work is gradually changing people's thinking.

Thomas Vander Wal, Mr. Folksonomy, talked about tagging. Why we tag, how we tag, when shouldn't we tag. My attention was wandering at this point to be honest, and my notes descended into daydreaming doodles, but I did manage to write down "hoovers, dogs" for some inexplicable reason. Sorry Thomas ;)

if Jeff Veen hadn't been billed, this years d.Construct would have been far less appealing for me. It's always a pleasure to hear him speak and today was no exception. The presentation was 'Designing The Complete User Experience' and he used his vast experience to take us from Hotwired and Jakob Neilson through to Quixtar and, finally, Google. With wit and enthusiasm, he explained how he personally addresses user requirements at Google (perform user research up front) and explained that "just following the rules gets us into trouble if we don't understand context." This was a thoroughly enigmatic and insightful presentation which should be online soon.

Despite my initial reservations, d.construct 06 was excellent and fantastic value for money (about six times cheaper than @media) - it's probably the only such event which people can afford out of their own pocket. Hopefully clear:left won't increase the numbers next year so that it can maintain it's accessibility and continue to be a true grassroots event. They have created something really special and long may it continue!

Original blog post: http://www.lylo.co.uk/blog/2006/09/10/on-dconstruct06/

Well dconstruct all done, good all round I thought although hard to stay awake during the folksonomy stuff!! Jeff barr great, Aral well energetic and hectic but excellent Jeff Veen good, derek great real world content. Simon and Pauls stuff was interesting too oh and jeremy mashup magic (wish i could remember those links..) Just waiting for 07..

d.construct06 : report
First of was Jeff Barr talking about the web services that Amazon provide.  There was a whole host that I didn’t even know about such as:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta)  - EC2 allows you to use amazons servers for doing processing when you need it, “…a true virtual computing environment”. The great this is you pay only for what you use.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) this is an online backup system.  One of the great features of this service is that you can host your files and then if you want to get access to them via your bit client just add ‘?torrent’ to the end and away you go!

Amazon E-Commerce Service – you can virtually create an Amazon store on your server and sit back and enjoy the commission.

Alexia host a few services such as

Alexa Web Information Service

Alexa Web Search Platform (Beta)

Alexa Top Sites

Alexa Site Thumbnail

Amazon Mechanical Turk  Through http://www.mturk.com you can “Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers.”  One great example of this was one chap wanted to get a 1000 sheep drawings and used Turk to do this, check out the results here: http://theSheepmarket.com

Amazon Historical Pricing

Amazon Simple Queue Service

Visit the Amazon Web Services home page to discover all the resources and information AWS offers.

So why would you want to use any of these services?
                Amazon has spent ten years and over $1 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers the Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Using Amazon Web Services, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology.
Indecently Jeff gave a similar chat in Second Life – check out Rik Riel post on that here http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2006/09/jeff_barr_web_e.html
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Next up where Paul Hammond and Simon Wilson talking about “Web services for fun and profit”.
Yahoos has a lot of APIs which you can access via there developer site http://developer.yahoo.com.  Yahoo encourages innovation through its company and one way they do this is through Hack Days. Developers mash up the API services that they Yahoo offer and if anyone hits on something great then they take it to the next level, one ‘hacker’ was so successful that he got hired and works on the Flickr Map.
They are a company that ‘eats their own dog food’.  The travel site for example mashes up the Map,  Search,  Editorial comments and Answers API.
Here are some other APIs:

·  Answers
·  del.icio.us
·  Finance
·  Flickr™
·  HotJobs
·  Maps
·  Merchant Solutions
·  Messenger
·  Music
·  RSS Feeds
·  Search
·  Search Marketing
·  Shopping
·  Traffic
·  Travel
·  Upcoming.org
·  Weather
·  Webjay
·  Widgets
·  Avatars
·  myWeb

Check them out.
Another thing that they brought up was that if you have good APIs that external companies can lock into, do you  still need you sales man?  APIs could get rid of the middle man. 
There term extraction API could be great for building Tags on your site. 
                The Term Extraction Web Service provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content
You could then take these words and they use them to tag your page.
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Jeremy Keith was up next talking about the Joy of APIs. 
One of the most interesting things from his presentation was that if you are a company leading the field you really need to get APIs out into the market place and if you’re the 1st to do this then you can dictate the standards for other web services with your space.  Take delicious for example – the 1st major social bookmark application (SBA) which all other SBA application now follows. 
Jeremy spoke a bit about REST (Representational State Transfer) vs SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and I have to agree with him I much prefer a REST when dealing with web services;  my main reason for this is for simplicity.  For more info on REST vs SOAP check out this post: Giving SOAP a REST
A nice website that Jeremy brought to my attention that I had forgotten about was http://www.programmableweb.com/.  It lists APIs, Mash ups and lots of other information.
Some people get a little worried when you start saying to them – “you should get some APIs man!” They think it’s a big deal?  Well to be honest most of us already have an API if you have a RSS feed.  It’s an API in a static state.  People can take your data and do what they want with it, ala API!.   If you’re a little unsure about creating them then try dapper.  This site tries to extract an API from your site using a screen scraper.
Check out Jeremy’s API list here: Joy of APIs
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Aral Balkan was up next with his flex mash up.  He showed how simple it is to use Flex to pull in API.  I’ve done a bit of work with Flex so I found this presentation a little low level but still nicely presented – and what’s with the roller shoes Aral?  Check out his blog for more information.  Also if you do anything with flash check out http://www.osflash.org/.
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One of the big problems with building a ‘Post 1.0’ web platform is accessibility.  Derek Featherstone gave a great presentation on seeing the site from another point of view.  Screen readers, zoomed in content are things that we should all think about when developing website.  As a simple test zoom the text on a website to full size and see if you can still navigate around easily it (or tab for that matter).   
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Thomas Vander Wal talked us though Folksonomy – better know to me as tagging/categorising.   The main point that I got from his presentation is that if you allow people to categorise (tag) the content on your site then you can see how people perceive the content.  “Every person is an expert in their own vocabulary (tags)”.  With this information you can then categorise your content more accordingly, thus allowing this and other users to find the content more quickly on your site.  Amazon has started using this and it shows some great examples.
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Last of it was Jeffery Veen – check out his PDF here for a run down – a great presenter.
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Buzz words of the day:
MicroFormats
XFN
MetaAPI
SAAS – Software as a service
E48 XML
AlphaGeek
Hardware as a Service

Simon and Paul have finished giving their presentation and very good it was too. They covered a lot of ground in a short time but they did it in a clear, easy to follow way. As is now mandatory, the presentation was illustrated with Flickr pics including one of mine, which I wasn't expecting. The guys did a good job of showing how useful APIs are from inside a huge company and from the evangelism they were doing, I expect to see Hack Days starting at other companies soon. The talk flowed nicely into my presentation where I talked about APIs from the viewpoint of someone on the outside looking in. That's no accident, of course: we planned the schedule that way. I think it worked out well.

At d.Construct 2006 Amazon's Jeff Barr gave an interesting insight in to the [many] services now provided by Amazon Web Services. The new buzz word that stuck in my brain was 'Hardware as a Service' which describes what I've been going on about for a while now. - Unless you are really big, who needs to invest in hardware any more!

A nice, quick intro. Letting the conference begin. Yay!