Posts Tagged: Barcamp

HTML5 — Barcamp Auckland 5

The last proper session I went to at Barcamp Auckland 5 was “Extreme AJAX – beyond the hashbang, building a robust single page JS framework and URL schema”, presented by Barry Hannah (@barryhannah) & Mark Zeman (@markzeman). They worked on the excellent newzealand.com redesign and gave some insight into its engineering. Continue reading “HTML5 — Barcamp Auckland 5” →

22 Jul 11 — No comments

Development productivity — Barcamp Auckland 5

Last weekend’s Barcamp Auckland unconference had social issues, comedy and politics, but of course no Barcamp would be complete without a heapin’ helping of software development geekery. Mal Curtis (@snikchnz) gave a packed presentation on Web Development Productivity, subtitled “What I use to quickly develop, deploy and maintain html, css, js, php & ruby code at learnable.com and (a lil’ bit) sitepoint.com. Git, Sass, Testing (Rspec, Cucumber, PHP too), Continuous Integration and deployment.” Actually that pretty much covers it. Continue reading “Development productivity — Barcamp Auckland 5” →

22 Jul 11 — No comments

Society — Barcamp Auckland 5

I attended a few sessions at Barcamp Auckland yesterday that concerned the Internet’s role in society. Vikram Kumar (@vikram_nz) and (@robertobrien) hosted a discussion about designing privacy into services and products. This was a wide-ranging talk — I learned about a few interesting projects. Continue reading “Society — Barcamp Auckland 5” →

17 Jul 11 — 1 comment

The Pomodoro Technique — Barcamp Auckland 5

The Pomodoro Technique is a way of managing your time for improved productivity. At Barcamp Auckland 5 today, Carol Green (@carolgreen) and Noemi Selisker (@thenoemi) gave a useful outline of the process, from a beginner’s point of view — Noemi has been using the technique for a couple of weeks, and Carol is just about to start. Continue reading “The Pomodoro Technique — Barcamp Auckland 5” →

17 Jul 11 — No comments

Barcamp Auckland 5

About 300 of New Zealand’s brightest gathered in Auckland today for the Barcamp Auckland 5 unconference. As with BCA4 last year, it was all pretty well-organised for an unconference, though there was an unsettling lack of espresso coffee. Continue reading “Barcamp Auckland 5” →

17 Jul 11 — 4 comments

What is User Experience? at BCA4

One of my favourite talks from Barcamp Auckland 4 was What is User Experience? by Haunani Pao (@haunanipao). She described UX from the point of view of a practitioner and gave a lot of insights into how she approaches UX work. I made a (very) few notes, and you can also see her presentation slides. I liked the use of graphics in the presentation: they clarified the talk rather than distracting from it.

So here are some of my notes and thoughts on the talk. Continue reading “What is User Experience? at BCA4” →

21 Aug 10 — No comments

Designing and Building Great Forms at BCA4

Web guy Phil Howie talked at Barcamp Auckland 4 recently about designing forms on the web. He singled out Luke Wroblewski as a good source of wisdom on this topic, especially Luke’s book Web Form Design. I can second that recommendation — I’ve posted about Luke’s form design ideas before. Continue reading “Designing and Building Great Forms at BCA4” →

1 Aug 10 — No comments

Building Facebook Applications at BCA4

Richard Wright of Federation Media talked at Barcamp Auckland 4 about building FaceBook applications –- pitfalls and promotion. He worked on a campaign that involved using a FaceBook application to give away free beer. Some interesting technical challenges and details there. And other challenges too — despite apparently being technically within FaceBook’s (extraordinarily complex) terms and conditions, the application was taken down when FB objected to the free alcohol angle.

He gave some insights into what went well and what didn’t about the campaign. In a sharing campaign like this, it’s important to clarify exactly what is being shared. Is it the beer token? Is it the beer itself? Or is it the get-together with friends to go to the bar to get the beer? He said a bit more thought in this area would have improved the participation level. He referred to Social Object Theory and posited that FaceBook’s Live Stream is its social “Supersoul”. This may fit in with the theory’s concepts, but the thought that FaceBook has a supersoul just makes me want to throw my computer out the window.

Continue reading “Building Facebook Applications at BCA4” →

19 Jul 10 — No comments

Illustration Friday (creative outlets) at BCA4

At work, are you relaxed? Creative? Fulfilled? Finding time within work hours to pursue creative endeavours or self-development with the idea that it will feed back into your work and make you better at what you do.

Carol Green led this discussion at Barcamp Auckland 4 about using work time to do essential but non-billable experimentation and research. I was impressed at the way she shrugged off the computer failure that stopped her using her slideshow. Instead she just talked us through it and inspired the whole audience to share their experiences. Very Barcamp. Continue reading “Illustration Friday (creative outlets) at BCA4” →

19 Jul 10 — No comments

Barcamp Auckland 4

BCA4 name tagYesterday I attended my first unconference: Barcamp Auckland 4. I learned a lot from the talks and presentations, but I also got a lot from the breaks in between and from the event as a whole. Here are some of my highlights.

Twitter is awesome for conferences. I tweeted interesting points from the sessions I attended, but I also regularly checked the #bcak4 hashtag to see what was going on in the other sessions. In some cases I missed bits of what the presenters said, but caught them a minute later as the person sitting next to me tweeted them. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed the rain on Twitter before I saw it outside the window.

The tweets really added a lot to the sessions. There were a handful of Twittering heroes there. A few times I heard a presenter mention some project or document, and within 60 seconds @vickytnz would tweet the reference along with the URL. Awesome.

Continue reading “Barcamp Auckland 4” →

19 Jul 10 — 7 comments