Keynote 1: Alexis Ohanian

The first keynote titled, “Only your mom wants to use your website” came from Alexis Ohanian, a geek who helped create Reddit, Hipmunk and a few other sites. He’s passionate about users and you can really see how that manifests itself and very appropriate for a conference with a theme of Userverse. He told the audience, “As geeks, we’re at an advantage. There are so many bad websites out there so if you focus on creating an awesome experience, it’s very easy to compete.” It just came back to treating your customers and really delighting your customers.

He uses some really great examples about how he engaged users with a couple of his websites. For example, with Reddit, there’s the mascot in the top hand corner of the page and talks about doing a 30-day animation series that really connected with dedicated reddit users who were so concerned when, during one the days, the mascot went missing and they emailed in constantly to find out where he went.

With hipmunk, he recounts the story of personally stuffing envelopes with handmand hipmunk travel stuff to send off to some of his users. For no good reason other than to surprise them. In return, people sent photos of the hipmunk in all sorts of places and travelling around. It’s the little things that really delight.

Keynote 2: Neal Ford

Neal’s a really awesome speaker and would highly recommend any technical person to watch his very strong presentations. Fortunately it looks like JFokus just published the same speech Neal gave at Øredev so you can see. The focus of his topic was really about Abstraction Distractions and is a really important key message for us technical folks. It also really relates well to this XKCD comic.

The whole premise about his talk is that users don’t really want to hear the techncial reasons why something does or doesn’t work. You have to make them undersatnd the impact of what it has. He seeds the presentations with lots of pro-tips including things like, “Don’t confuse the abstraction with the real thing” giving the example of wanting to store a recipe and concerned about how to store a recipe that will last many technologies, that even its representation isn’t quite the same thing as the recipe itself.

The ImageThink graphic facilitators had trouble keeping up with the pace that Neal speaks at. He’s definitely the sort of high energy, many idea kind of guys.

Keynote 3: Dan North

Dan is a great an entertaining speaker than everyone really enjoys. He spoke on “Embracing Uncertainty – the Hardest Pattern of All.” I guess a lot of his entertaining anecdotes and stories were really focused around our human bias for closure.

Keynote 4: Jeff Atwood

I’m glad to hear Jeff present this keynote, “Social Software for the Anti-Social Part II: Electric Boogaloo” as he handed over one of his speaking slots to an employee of his in a talk on a previous day that turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for many people. His keynote carried on from a previous talk, carrying on with lots of lessons learned, particularly about how they built Stackoverflow with game mechanics in mind.

It’ll probably be online soon, but it’s one definitely worth watching as it’s an interesting balance between democracy, openness yet some directing behaviour thrown in.

About the conference

I’m constantly impressed by the organisation and the the quality of the conference. I’m really surprised it doesn’t attract more people from Europe and what I call, a little bit of a hidden gem. It has some really wonderful speakers, great topics and the venue itself is pretty good (although there’s poor noise isolation between the different rooms). There’s plenty of interesting events in the evenings and a great place to chat to people both during and after the conference, although I think the “unofficial” Øredev pub needs to grow a bit to accomodate so many geeks.

Other talks of significance

I went to quite a number of talks but will write up some of the more interesting ones (for me).

  • Copenhagen Suborbitals – This was a bit of a surprise talk. It was very late in the day, ending almost at about 9pm or 10pm and was a guy based in Copenhagen who’s attempting to build his own spaceship to launch him into suborbital. It’s a really amazing tale and one I can appreciate for a guy who’s serious about following his passion. The talk started off quite entertainingly about how building a spaceship was a bit ambitious, so he started off by building a submarine! He’s a really engaging speaker and I don’t want to ruin too many of his good stories. I suggest going over to his blog (he’s still building his spaceship) and seeing where he is. He relies on donations to keep this project running and I love the fact it’s such an open-source project as well with people offering their advice and expertise in many different areas. He’s got lots of great lessons to share that are completely relevant to everyone.
  • Aaron Parecki on his startup story for Geoloqi – I listened to this guy talk about his startup, and similarly along the same lines at the Orbitals, he told the tale of what started off as a hobby eventually turned into a real startup opportunity and shared a lot of his lessons along the way. It’s an interesting start up that you can read more about on gizmodo here
  • Jeff Patton – Jeff had a great session introducing people to the UX stage and trying to set the stage for lots of the other speakers. Jeff has a wealth of wisdom and experience to share and what was really powerful was him sharing images and stories about the different roles and techniques people use to build useful software and integrating it into agile processes. Really powerful stuff that I think every developer should really go through.

Reflections on my talk
Titled, “Collaboration by better understanding yourself”, I presented on the idea that we have lots of in built reactions as developers that really hold us back from collaborating more effectively. My goal was for people to go away, thinking more about the things that effect them and why they don’t collaborate as much as they should. I got some great feedback and was particularly nervous because not only did I have a good number of people but I had many other presenters I really respected in attendance including Portia Tung, Doc List, Johanna Rothman, Jean Tabaka, Jim Benson and more.

Although I’d practiced, there’s a few more tweaks I would make to this, but was very happy with some of the people who came up to me throughout the conference who felt that they really connected to the topic and felt really enthused to do something about it. Exactly what I wanted. 🙂