I’m pleased to announce i’ll be speaking at Design it, Build it - A one day web conference on April 28th in Newcastle. It’s aimed at both designs & developers with a separate track of talks for each

I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades most of the time, with my time (and passion) split evenly between frontend and backend. So it’s great to see a conference with such a great mix of topics, definately the kind of thing i’d be attending anyway if I wasn’t speaking.

I’m really pleased to have been invited to speak and even though it’s still a few months away I’m already getting excited. My topic is “Last.fm Vs Xbox360”, a look at profiling, optimizing, scaling and launching new features, using the recent Last.fm Xbox Live app as a working example. I’m a big fan of presentations that include a healthy dose practical examples, I’ve got a “Tales from the trenches” style in mind.

Today’s the last day to get a discounted early-bird ticket. If you want to buy a ticket you can save ~60% by using the code “dibi_hohoho”, but only till the end of the day. I believe they’ve still got some Student tickets available at a reduced rate, get in touch if you’re interested in those.

I’ve been back a couple of days now, so of course people have asked how it was, and my response has been ‘Amazing‘. I really do mean that, the entire week was great. It was a fantastic holiday, full of interesting panels, great people, delicious food and excellent parties. I’ve already started hustling friends into coming next year.

My original plan was to make a blog post once a day, which fell by the way side pretty quickly, after two days infact. It turns out SXSW is really quite a lot of fun, and theres not the time for blogging or uploading photos to flickr. I didn’t take long to realise SXSW is as much about parties as it is panels.

In my book this is a good thing, a great thing. A lot of the ideas being discussd in panels aren’t new to me, topics I already know well or could learn somewhere else. There are a lots of great UK conferences, there are community events, there are lots of blog posts, articles and tutorials online that can help with this. So I made a point of going to the more obscure panels I knew little about and the social side of things.

I’m a little glad that the trip was mostly self funded, i’d feel kind of bad if work had funded the whole thing as I missed quite a few panels due to hangovers. It’s not that i’ve come away without learning anything, just that a lot of what I learnt wasn’t directly related to my day-to-day job.

A very brief round up of what I enjoyed would include; Panels: Douglas Coupland, Attack of the ARGs, Learning from Adult Sites, Warren Spector on Storytelling and Will Wright’s Keynote. Parties: Great British Booze-Up, Pure Volume, Frog Design.

So i’ve already fallen a day behind on my plan to throw something up here every day.

I just got in on friday, so my recolection of yesterday is a little hazy.

It turns out we get free breakfast, score! Decided to avoid the geekery and conference stuff a bit and walked down to part of South Congress that a stewardess on our Austin flight recomended to me. Lots of little boutiques, indie stores and thift stores. Pretty cool and very cheap, bought a pretty nifty shirt.

Had some fantastic mexican food at the Rio Grande just round the corner from our hotel, really nice, and so far the only food i’ve not taken food porn pictures of. I’ve been told theres even better mexican resteraunts around so i’ll have to check some of those out over the next few days.

Since the weathers been great Frances and I decided to chill out by the pool and maybe go for a swim. The later part of this plan got abandonded pretty quickly as the pool was colder than the english channel. Unfortunately chilling round the pool in austin sunlight, without sunblock, when you’re pale and british means instant burning. So i’m going to have a pink complection.

In addition to free breakfast, turns out we also get happy hour, 60 minutes of free wine/beer (Delete as applicable). Life is good.

A group of us went out to a Cuban place near 6th, Mojitos all round and some pretty nice food (Photos on flickr). Followed by a lot of drinking, socialising and table football at Buffalo Billiards. Needless to say as a brit with little expirence of foosball, I got my ass wooped. Lucky Stuart and Paul stepped up and recovered our nations pride.

Its now  1:30am and presentations start tomorrow, so an early night and breakfast is a priority.

Sorry to the (few) people who haven’t been been able to access the site recently. For the past 6 months or so I’ve been hosting this blog on the server at work, so when we switched ISP’s (and thusly IPs) I completely forgot to update my DNS record.

Although it’s handy to host this at work I think it’d be for the best to get some proper hosting. We’ve done quite a lot of internal network reorganising recently, which means availability has been a bit patchy. It also means i cant host huge copyright infringing files Linux ISOs. I’ve been looking at switching to Dreamhost, as they have a pretty nice set of features, but I’m curious if anyone would recomend anything else?

Pub Standards

Tomorrow (Thursday) marks Pub Standards XV, the usual web/booze collision in the middle of London. The sly of you may noticed that the landmark Pub Standards C has been scheduled for March 13, 2014, I think Patrick might be being a little optomistic.

Barcamp

After managing to snag a ticket for Barcamp London 2 I’m really looking forward to it, unfortunately I have no idea what to give a presentation on. Don’t get me wrong, i’m full of ideas (contrary to the evidence of this blog recently), but presenting to a group of geeks, meant as a compliment, who really know their stuff is quite a daunting prospect. I’ve been finding it very hard to decide on a topic I feel authorative on, as i’m still somewhat a jack of all trades, rather than having a specialist subject.

My last ditch plan is a discussion on the dangers of microformats and how a semantic web isn’t all rainbows and kittens, but i’m very open to suggestions for somerthig better.

FOWA

Future of Web Apps is a two day event in London the week after Barcamp, definately a lot more business-y than any other events i’ve been to. I couldn’t help but get that impression while signing up an being if I was a Designer, Developer, Information Archiatect, MD or Venture Capitalist. Crikey, makes Pub Standards feel like free love and communism.

Still, the line up of speakers is quite interesting and i’m curious to see how it compares to, the seemingly much more grass roots, dconstuct of 2006. And of course, it’s paid for by work, so that’s nice.

SXSW

Texas! I can’t believe this is so soon, it’s really crept up on me, which you can take to mean I’ve organised nothing for the trip and everything will be done at the last minute, still I can’t wait. It’ll be my first time in the States, or for that matter on a plane, so it will certainly be an interesting experience. Not to mention a week+ off work, now that wil be nice.

I’ve been back from Brighton for almost 24 hours now and I’ve just about caught up on sleep. It was a blast.

Thursday Night

The pre-event part at Heist was good fun, meeting and talking with people I’ve met before at London events and some new ones. Unfortunately I don’t think the planned salsa lessons organized by Adam ever materialized!

After being kicked out around 12:30 a rather large group headed towards Brighton sea front to keep drinking. Only half a dozen made it that far and after Patrick Griffiths tried to convince us to go to the ‘Honey Club’ we ended up going back to the hotel for a relatively early night.

The Event Itself

The next morning registration was very quick and easy, we also got presented with goody bags including BBC backstage t shirts, a copy of .net, Creative Commons badges and the usual array of pens, stickers and such.

I won’t go into details of the presentations (As I plan to (h)review them later), but I particularly enjoyed Jeremy’s Joy and Simon/Paul explaining how API’s have benefited Yahoo internally.

One thing that struck me throughout the days presentation was the emphasis on the open data APIs and Web Services can provide, licensing and just how open some data should be. A few speakers struck on this briefly, notably Aral Balkan mentioning postcode/geo-coding in the UK, but it really needs more discussion.

Micoformats

Although I’ve not been vocally active around Microformats on my blog I have following the project and quietly adding hCard and XFN data where I can. So It was great to see a big turn out for the Microformats picnic. Jeremy Keith preached to the assembled mass of geeks, plus a small group of confused locals (who I heard told thought it was a scientology meeting).

Friday Evening

After the final presentation everyone slowly migrated towards the after for food, drink and golf. After a quick meal a group of us pottered down to the Geek Golf tournament, although the results aren’t all in I think managed to play a winning round, months of pitch and put practice on Portsmouth seafront might have paid of after all.

Back to the party and I got to chat with a lot of people from all over the country exchanging stories, jokes, drinks and web 2.0-base crime ideas. I especially enjoyed talking to Damien Tanner about a XFN-powered Six Degrees of Separation Jeffery Zeldman, which I hope he still plans to work on.

As people began to leave, catching last trains or driving home, a group of us walked along to Blanch House for cocktails and more banter and drunkenness. A special thanks to Frances for giving me a spare bed to sleep on that night and introducing me to some very interesting/nice people.

About 3am I wandered through the streets of Brighton to the hotel with Patrick and Frances, discussing (amongst other things) atheism, nihilism and existentialism in the lobby until 4 am. A topic that’s sure to be picked up again at the coming Pub Standards.

Saturday

The morning didn’t start for me until a coffee on Brighton pier at midday, getting quite wet probably help woke me up too. Frances and I met up with those who were left, Andy, Jeremy, Simon, Natalie, Norm, Derek (and others), for lunch and a wander along the beach.

The highlights included watching Simon Willison and Natalie Downe Try The Thrilling Bungy Trampoline (Only £5!) (photos) and finding a cheap second hand copy of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X.

Conclusions

I absolutely loved dconstruct 2006. Well organised, engaging and informative speakers, goodie-bags, booze and of course all of the fun of the sea side.

ClearLeft did an amazing job keeping everything running smoothly and most of all enjoyably. Checkout some of the photos and blog posts by others.