The concept of a conference is a good one. Great minds in an industry coming together to share wisdom and spend time with others who share their passion and interest is a positive use of anyone’s time. The problem with things that look so great on paper is that, due to unforeseen variables, they often fall short of their potential. I’ve been thinking about why I didn’t enjoy FoWA and why I did in an attempt to understand whether I should go to them again, and attending dconstruct served to illustrate that I am a conferences guy, but I have to make some concessions and choose where I go carefully!
Firstly, I’m going to assume that every industry that has these things is the same. I know they’re not, but you understand that I’m talking about my own personal observations. Your mileage may vary and I’d like to know why it does, if you have time.
Humans are obsessed with celebrity. We love it. Those of us who believe ourselves to be above it are not. We go weak-kneed and fumbly when in the presence of our heroes and there’s no two ways about it. I don’t like this behaviour, but I am definitely not immune to it. I try to remember that people I consider to be celebrities are just people who’ve excelled in their field and gained a lot of recognition for what they do. They’re normal people who do normal things like apply deodorant and get their hair cut and cross the road and hate aubergines and we tend to forget this.
Conferences are a great way to create celebrities. If you’ve a relatively obscure interest, they effectively gather successful people to talk about how they got successful and tell you how to be more successful and that’s fundamentally a good thing. I think it’s important, however, to remember that the concept of a celebrity isn’t particularly healthy for the subject or the observer. On a long enough timeline, a subject will grow aware of and buy into their hype and become aloof (if they weren’t already!) and the observer will go to further extremes of their character type (the sycophant or the hater) and it becomes a self-perpetuating monster. No-one wants that.
Furthermore, as an attendee, you’re likely to be in love with what you do. You’re hardly going to sit for a whole day and listen to someone harp on about asparagus if you hate asparagus. Therefore, I think it’s important to have people talk conceptually on their subject. If you’re at a web development conference, listening to an evangelist preach HTML5 is redundant. You might make some conversions, but you shouldn’t be there to do that! The people who are going to embrace your talk will all know everything you’re going to say anyway, and the naysayers with conviction will probably just bitch about you on twitter.
So, why was dconstruct so good? For me, it was because people were talking in the abstract. I am a PHP developer primarily. I have other interests related to this industry but, gun to head, my day starts <?php and ends ?>. Whether I’m any good at it or not is irrelevant, but it’s not going to be beneficial to me to listen to another PHP developer talk about either why PHP is so good or why they’re so good at it. There was none of this at dconstruct.
(Quick disclaimer. What I took away from people’s talks isn’t necessarily what they were talking about, so if you’re one of the people I am talking about and I got it wrong, maybe you should consider your approach!)
Marty Neumeier’s talk on beating the game by getting ahead of it seemed like stating the obvious. He talked about four different types of new product (different-good, different-not-good, not-different-good and not-different-not-good) and, although I felt his process for identifying these products was flawed in that you had to wait until it had gone to market to really tell, he gave a good framework for new product developers to decide on whether something was worth the effort really only based on an idea. A lot of companies wouldn’t be failing if they listened to a guy like Marty talk for 30 minutes.
Brendan Dawes’ talk on how to get the most out of your product and process by removing as much of it as you feasibly can was quite inspirational to me. This is something that I have quite a strong opinion on not only because it can be a real money saver, but because it can also improve your overall product by removing the weak links. It was, therefore, reassuring to hear that someone I consider to be successful has had such success by following an ideal that I subscribe to. If you weren’t interested in what he was saying, the anecdotes, animations and accent should’ve been enough to involve you anyway.
David McCandless spoke about his approach to data visualisation and made me jealous that he’s been able to get access to stacks of data to do cool things with, but he also strikes me as the guy at the party who will call you in a week with an answer to whether there’s a correlation between breakups and major holidays, or whether cool is cooler than awesome. More than that, though, he made you feel like it’s good to be that guy, and it can be really rewarding and unpredictably interesting to investigate things in this way. He seems to be really inspired by social interactions, which I can relate to. I tend to obsess over byproducts of social interactions, and I was pleased to see that it can be productive!
Unfortunately, I was interrupted during James Bridle, so I think I missed a lot but what I did hear about the interconnectedness of data and the importance of revision as a journey (using Wikipedia and those awesome Iraq war volumes as a case in point) just hit the nail on the head. We have the ability as a hive to revise and collect all of our knowledge to educate and solve, and I hope this ability becomes part of everything. Wikipedia is criticised heavily for containing inaccurate information, but I rarely see it done by intelligent people. They’re too busy correcting the mistakes.
John Gruber spoke a lot about movies and Kubrick and I like both of those things.
Tom Coates’ presentation was like 8GB, and visually brilliant. Sadly, I don’t feel like I really gained anything from it. He spoke about the abstract concept of a network and how practical applications can benefit everyone. If you get a chance to see this, you should because he’s a great speaker!
Merlin Mann is an interesting guy. He doesn’t at all look like any picture I’ve ever seen of him. He spoke about the importance of being a nerd, how it’s dangerous to be comfortable with your abilities and making good choices. He’s basically the voice of all nerds, giving us a big hug and going “it’s ok, no great, to be a nerd but, in the interest of mortality, you should dial it down around people who don’t care”. The world needs nerds to obsess over the things that no-one else cares about. Nerds will constantly be trying to improve things that they disapprove of, and I don’t think that constant, objective improvement has ever been a bad thing. The A-bomb’s obviously terrible, but it’s a damn good example of a thing built to do a thing that does it fucking well. And it’s because of nerds.
I was a little disappointed that all-but-two of the talkers seemed to escape and not attend the after party. I knew that John Gruber would leave – he barely had any interest in getting up and speaking, much less mingling for five minutes with the people without whom he’d be nothing. That being said, it was nice to chat with Brendan about moviepeg and how, as a developer, I’m interested to see how designers approach things and elaborate on that a bit more, and it was cool to chat with Merlin further about embracing nerdism. I try not to be that guy who goes up to speakers and go YOU.WERE.GREAT because I don’t consider it to be constructive (and there are almost definitely enough people to do that without me chiming in), so I only attempted to talk to the people I felt like there was more to say to.
If you were there, or know anything about the speakers, you will notice that there are some omissions. My mum told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you should keep quiet (those of you who know me should see your faces!).
