A quick run through the talks from DIBI '12, as much to remind myself later as to inform the masses. You'll find links to all the speakers on the dibi site at https://www.dibiconference.com/schedule/ until I get time to come back and slot them in. I jumped tracks a few times - why don't you play 'guess the track' basd on the description.

Seb Lee-Delisle, 'Design it and build it'

This was a great talk - really upbeat, enthusiastic, and I would imagine most of us left with a feeling we should really play a bit more with 'visual stuff' built with code.

He live coded a javascript particle emitter on stage - piece by piece - to show the 'designers that don't code' how easy it is. Before that he'd used a C64 emulator to create generative art. Great stuff. Reminded me of the old days of drawing line patterns on the speccy to get weird moire patterns wiggling about on the screen. Speccy for loops ftw!

Takeaway - the journey informs the destination - just get stuck in

The 2 Pauls, 'the challenges of designing for everyone - revolutionising the UK government online'

I should really have gone to the node.js talk on the other track - but this is really interesting stuff. The talk centred on a review of the key design principles of the project - with examples of how they are applied. Some of the comparisons of the 'old way' and the new interpretation are properly impressive. I love the thinking behind most of this. To hear government talking about MVP, RWD, Agile etc... is pretty exciting actually. If you haven't been already, have a rummage around https://www.gov.uk/

Takeaway - user test user test user test

Brian LeRoux, 'Mobile web programming is a bloody mess!'

This was a good run through of the landscape for mobile, and background on phone gap. Brian obviously knows his hardcore JS and I got a lot out of this one - one of the more practical talks.

Takeaway - mobile is hard, but debug tools are here and they work so stop wining

Chris Mills and Bruce Lawson, 'The DIBI Panto'

That's not the actual name of the talk - but it may as well have been. Costumes, sound effects, boos from the audience. Banging the drum for standards, accessibility and feature detection. Nothing particularly new for me - but a good fun presentation.

Takeaway - funny is good

Ted Roden, 'Going Solo'

Ted has a pretty brutal, focussed, down to earth view of the 'startup landscape'. And his view is from a distant hill. His approach to releasing features - don't start something you can't ship today - makes me happy. I'm not sure why - it just does. I'm kind of annoyed this clashed with Paul Boag - who I'd also like to have seen - but I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Great talk.

Takeaway - 'it ships today' 

Scott Rutherford, 'Failing up'

This wasa really interesting run through of the birth and toddler years of User Voice. Some funny stuff, and some really interesting stuff about how to deal with software / hardware fails in the face of customer demand.

Takeaway - react quickly and openly when stuff goes wrong

Cameron Moll, 'The burden of being creative'

Cameron did some of his presentation live using the Paper ipad app to draw his slides. It was an interesting approach, but slowed things up in a few places. I was impressed with his penmanship, the standard pen in Paper is a nightmare to write with.

Cameron built up an equation to define creativity. I'm not sure I agree with his final equation - but I like the idea of demystifying creativity in this way. 

Overall

So Seb gave the most awesome/brilliant (delete as applicable) talk, and Ted gave the best takeaway (it ships today). The workshop on Monday was great fun, and the conference day flew by. The beef noodles for lunch were tasty, and the pizza at night appreciated. I even got a 5am Saint in. 

DIBI is a great conference - you should definitely go next year.

Now, I'm off to write some generative javascript art to be seeded by some arduino interactive tinfoil fuzzy connections through the analog inputs to run through a node.js back end, sync'd onto every screen in the house.  Should be fun. 

(download)

Click here to download:

dibi-day-2-conference-ludiqusldruHpsCtuqJr.zip (21.79 MB)

PS - I've no idea why the pics above have random order. I'd fix it, but posterous is likely to be subsumed into twitter before I figure it out!

I now love arduino beyond reason. This was a genuinely enjoyable afternoon spent surrounded by pretty focussed nerds playing with LEDs and C. I seldom get a chance to take part in a workshop - and this was good fun.

@nrocy ran a pretty good workshop. It felt structured, but flexible enough to handle questions, and was paced well to cover material while allowing a bit of play during the afternoon. We had to type stuff out, actually writing code with some guidance rather than just listening to explanations of what 'test-proj-4.txt' does. Perfect approach.

We ran through the 'hello world' stuff, some theory, and had to build circuits based on circuit diagrams (rather than arduino wiring diagrams) which was a solid start. I haven't written C in anger since the mid 90s - so you certainly don't need major C skills to get stuck in. 

We even got to play with tinfoil. No hats though (sad face).

What I enjoy about arduino is the same thing I enjoyed back when I was first learning BASIC on the spectrum - you can achieve a host of cool things using a small test code set. Tinkering with a small program - just changing variables, sequences, and testing in / out puts gets a new dimension when you have physical STUFF to play with.

If you get a chance to do this workshop take it.

Earlier today I went to Whisky Web.  

I went down on the train on the morning so missed the opening keynote (sad face) as I only got to venue at 9:45.

But here's a quick round up of the talks I saw:

Open street map
Derick Rethans

I loved the obvious passion for the subject matter, and totally want to organise a Refresh Aberdeen mapping party in the summer. Maybe map everything at Balmedie before the BBQ?. I've also doodled out half a dozen things I need to investigate on OSM. You can't ask for more from a talk. Great stuff.

Essential Node.js
Mike Amundsen

I've played with node.js a bit, I like it. It's nice. I got a fair bit out of this talk. A reminder of the reason node exists, some tips on using it, and some reassurance that I'm doing alright with express and socket.io in my project. JS is fun. Mike was probably the most polished speaker.

The emperor's new clothes
Kevinjohn Gallagher

This wasn't my cup of tea. I can live without argumentative Zeldman bashing, boobies on slides, and endless innuendo laden star trek jokes. Sorry man - maybe caught you on a bad day.

Mashing Up JavaScript
Bastian Hofmann

I found this one a little frustrating. Great content, fired through at lightening pace, with huge enthusiasm. Jumping from presentation to editor to terminal to browser was hard to keep a handle on though - making it feel really disjointed. That said, I've also filled a couple of pages with js stuff to try out around ideas from the talk. So with a bit less jumping around this would be a great talk. Or a really good day long workshop.

Is your App ready for the cloud
Thijs Feryn

I really don't look after any apps that need the level of hosting that Thijs gets excited about. I enjoyed the talk though - interesting issues and knowledgeable speaker. I want to find out more about the MS cloud offerings just out of interest.

How the Web evolves with Hypermedia
David Zülke

Loved it. Keynotes should present a world view. We saw a world view. And a shark. Have some code to change next week off the back of this. Great fun, thoughtful stuff.

For a conference pulled together at such short notice it had a great atmosphere, some good talks, and tasty vegetarian lasagne.

Well done guys.

As I type this (sitting on my train north drinking a cold Nero triple latte) everyone else is getting a whisky master class from @whiskycraig. Bad timing of the last train home - Craig is the man! :(

I don't know how everyone else felt about the ticket price. Personally, £50 for a full day catered conf with sharks and malt whisky at a proper venue seems cheap.

Juozas said in the closing remarks that they hope to bring it back next year, you should all get a ticket.

The DIBI videos are up. They're all worth a look - but that's a weekend killer - so I'd suggest these 3 are the ones I've thought about most since the event and are worth pulling to the front of your list:

Kevin Mann - nice guy did stuff, doing it again, loads of interesting stuff in here.

Jeremy Keith - content first. devices or viewports. I won't repeat his prefered title for the talk here, my mum might read it.

Corey Donohoe - tools tools tools - watch this and tell me you don't want to work at github!