The first day is over and what have I learnt?
- that I should stop goign to blogging panels as I’m not picking up anything new. The better converasations on that topic are one on one.
- how the term AJAX was derived – and something that the coiner Jesse thought was a small concept rapidly took over his life.
- that whilst AJAX may be cool, there are still a lot of problems with usability and accessibility – but the answers are being made up on the fly; there is never a master plan
- that AJAX is the obvious next step but not the obvious last step in the evolution of the web as an application platform. There’s a lot more to come and quickly
- if entrepeneurs want to become businesspeople, their key skill is to learn quickly
- the curious will inherit the earth (Jim Coudal)
- do things on the side, respect the constraints and believe that less is more. (Jason Fried)
- One opinion of functional specs: “they are illusions of agreement. Everyone understands something different. They build the interfaces first and then drive reactions to it to get agreement and agree on real stuff. Little cost to add something to a func spec, but adding a new feature to a product gives you pain, so you assess and challenge. A func spec is a yes doc.”
- the wisdom of crowds is difficult to achieve but there are three key things – you need aggregation of judgement, diversity of opinion and experience and independence of choice. (James Surowiecki)
Interestingly, the best panel I saw all day was the Barcamp on on open source. Insights from such diverse compnaies such as Sun, WordPress and Flock.
I’ve removed the notes taken from yesterday’s sessions and probably won’t put more up until the end when I can do some editing. Now onto Day 2