Sat 27 Sep 2008

Thoughts About Web Directions South

A couple of months ago I was asked to be on a "frameworks" panel, talking about Django, at the local (Sydney-based) Web Directions South conference. This isn't the sort of conference I would normally attend, since it seems to be primarily targeted at website developers and designers, rather than coders and backend developers. I like speaking, though, and was happy to be invited. But I really was (or, at least, felt like) an outsider at the event, so here are a few thoughts watching from the outside.

The Frameworks Panel

Firstly, our panel seemed to go reasonably well. Lucas Chan did a smooth job of moderating myself,Andrew Eddie from the Joomla (PHP) and Tim Lucas, who was pimping for Ruby on Rails. We had the advantage of having seen the Javascript library panel the day before ours and were able to plan things out a bit so that we (hopefully) struck a balance between informative and not overwhelmingly fast. I suspect it's hard to get across what makes three things like Django, Joomla and Rails different if somebody hadn't heard of any of them before hand, so we tended to all be in violent agreement about most things. The real takeaway for the audience was probably that there are good frameworks available in any language, so you should pick on that works best with the skills of your development team.

Talking to various people who stayed for the full two hours (we were up against some pretty good talks in the other tracks, so lost a few people partway through), it seemed like we all got our major points across. I had a bunch of conversations throughout the afternoon and evening with people who were thinking of taking up Django for large or small projects inside their organisation, or who were already using some other Python tools.

The Conference As A Whole

The other talks I went to were a bit of a mixed bunch, but mostly because I wasn't the target audience, I suspect. Still, if I switched off from the specifics — which often felt like restatements of problems that desktop and backend system developers have already been addressing for a few years — the consistent message was that there's a lot of information that people have access to, or would like to have access to and presenting that on a website requires planning and skill. As "sharing" becomes a larger and larger part of the standard website experience, for better or worse, there are more data sources that can be consumed, pushed to, displayed. Since accessibility and internationalisation aren't going away (thankfully), that adds an extra couple of dimensions to the problem. That's why these aren't the same problems that the other groups I mentioned above have been solving. They're similar, but not identical; websites reach a larger audience through a less functional, mostly more consistent set of interface restrictions and presenting the end result in a way that's appropriate to the delivery medium and viewer is a very specific problem.

The talks seemed to fall nicely into "new technologies" — HTML5, CSS 3, whatever might replace/evolve Javascript — explanation of established technologies — internationalisation practices, metadata and identity sharing, frameworks, Javascript libraries (another panel) — and some "real world" examples and descriptions. I'm simplifying somewhat here, since that leaves out talks like Jeffrey Veen and Mark Pesce's keynotes that were addressing somewhat broader themes.

The organisation was excellent, venue was nice (a bit short on power points for a laptop-heavy conference, though), catering was well done and the speaker all came across as prepared, knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

Yet, I left relatively unsatisfied with what I'd heard. Maybe it's because this was a conference about the user-visible side of the web, so a lot of the things were already out there on the web and I'd already read a bunch about them, seen slides from similar presentations (a problem with having big-name speakers is that the same folks speak at other conferences and often recycle large or small portions of previous talks), or already had some exposure to a bunch of the issues through writing the supporting infrastructure for some of this stuff (both recently with Django in open source and consulting work, and previously when writing desktop software). But, again, I wasn't the target audience. These people were professional web developers. Most of them are "in the business" and this conference was a way to keep up to date and maybe get a glimpse of the future, I guess.

A Talk I Want Somebody To Give

During Daniel Burka's talk about the re-redesign of Digg's commenting system, he made passing reference to one early change to story displays on Digg that was essentially a reorganisation of the metadata displayed with a story (who posted it, what the follow-up options were, etc). This reminded me of a talk I keep wanting to hear. Or it might be a paper that could be written. Essentially, a survey and dissection of various ways of presenting, or choosing to omit, the metadata associated with objects on a web page. When I redesigned the front page of this blog earlier this year, the main thing I wanted to change was to reduce the amount of space on the front page that was given over to important, but secondary data such as when the article was posted and the categories it belongs to. This is a problem that exists on a much larger scale on more social/sharing sites like Digg, Facebook, Pownce, Flickr, MySpace, del.icio.us, etc, and not all of the approaches used by any of those sites. Even just looking at a sampling of Wordpress themes shows a variety of approaches to the problem.

So, if you're a designer with a bent for studying existing practice and working out the patterns, there's a talk idea you can have for free. It's no doubt a lot of work, but I'd love to hear the results.

Topics: conferences, life