SDC Chicago Talk Takeaways

August 29, 2011

This past weekend I headed up north for SocialDevCamp Chicago 2011.

Though I spent most of the time coding a project for the hackathon (and won a prize for the second straight year!), I was able to make it to a few of the talks at the actual conference.

I was unimpressed with the talks at last year’s SDC Chicago, but I was pleasantly surprised with the speakers this time around. So here are my notes:

##Design for Hackers - David Kadavy

I had previously run across David Kadavy through a series of blog posts he did that were popular on HackerNews. The topic of this talk was “Whitespace” and some of the key points were:

  • Whitespace shapes design even though it is often thought of as “nothingness”
  • Gestalt Theory explains how our brains perceive and group visual elements
  • Similar objects have a sense of “togetherness”
  • The principle of Proximity explains how objects that are close together seem connected
  • Closure is how our brains “auto-connect the dots”
  • Use consistent and purposeful line-heights and leading to improve the flow of a page
  • Tufte’s 1+1=3 concept - two lines with whitespace between is really three items

I was familiar with most of the material in this talk, but I felt like it was a good introduction to design. I am still on the fence about whether or not I want to pick up David’s upcoming book.

##API Driven Development - Craig Ulliott Craig talked about building WhereIveBeen’s data/API abstraction layer, the mistakes he made, and how to design a better, more scalable solution. I liked this talk because Craig was opinionated and spoke about his thoughts - I feel like this allowed him to talk about specific ways to improve your API design instead of trying to please everyone with general advice.

  • Craig suggested that start-ups build an API with Rails because of its RESTful nature and code readability
  • You can always do a rewrite if you need to, you will probably have much more resources if you reach a point where you can’t scale Rails
  • Keeping a standard data model allows new services to be quickly integrated
  • For mobile use, allow a “fields” option to minimize response size (aim for one network packet!)
  • It is faster to cache a query that shows too much data and filter down fields in a different layer of the stack than hit the database again

##Heedful Programming - Dave Hoover I was really looking forward to this talk after reading Apprenticeship Patterns, which Dave co-authored, and it was really, really good.

  • Dave talked about his background in psychology and studies by Karl Weick about the crews on aircraft carriers
  • Heedful interrelating is the idea of making knowledge connections between team members to better handle complex problems
  • Siloing really breaks down when a project needs multiple experts to collaborate on a solution
  • Is your team habitual or heedful? Which code fits your process: next_week = clone(last_week) or next_week = retrospect(last_week)?
  • Bring in new blood that will question the process, “elders” should welcome new ideas
  • If something in your process is painful, do it more - it will force you to get better at it, improve the process, or show you it is not needed
  • Have a safe environment for developers to practice speaking or sharing ideas, encourage involvement with the dev community
  • Use process as a tool to build trust, then use that trust to remove barriers in the process

So many points resonated with me that I am going to “fork” Dave’s talk and present it at a brownbag at SEP. It really made me think about how to improve my team’s own process and made me want to bring more aspects of Obtiva’s apprentice system to SEP.

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