Keynote

The Keynote was Jeffrey Veen's "Designing our way through Data". Jeffrey started by taking us back into the year 1974 where he discovered for the first time that humans can be able to control things that happen on a screen - by playing a pong machine at a restaurant in a local Sears. He then went through several examples showing how different people made large amounts of data understandable to others by choosing the right visualizations.

The start was John Snow mapping the deaths caused by Cholera in London in 1854 and thus proving the water mains to be the main cause of the outbreak. Other examples were a mapping of the travels of Napoleon's armies through Europe, Harry Beck's Tube Map - a representation of the London Underground still in use today, up to Edward Tufte's case study on the viualization of the data that lead to the Challenger disaster.

The main message was to find the story in the data and to visualize that in the most appropriate manner for the intended audience. The example Jeffrey gave was a whole set of data explaining the earth population growth rate being distilled to the fact that every 2.4 seconds a new baby is born.

He then turned the story around to the people we want to reach with our data visualizations and the main takeaway was to analyze what people do with your information and make it as easy as possible to successfully finish these tasks. This is especially important to do as early as possible in the development cycle as it gets more and more expensive to change software solutions the further down the line you progress.

For Example: BBC Homepage (Tom Cartwright and Claire Roberts)/ Edenbee (James Box, Clearleft)

Following the keynote I attended a double showcase session in the smaller hall showing the redesign of the BBC homepage, showing the audience infrastructure issues the team had to deal with and explaining why the BBC chose to create an own JavaScript library to create all the behaviours of the site. The library will be called "Glow" and more information will be available on the BBC site soon.

Edenbee is a social network site set out to tackle climate change. You can track your carbon footprint using the APIs provided by Amee.cc, suggest ways to reduce it and share these tips and achievements with others in your network. The presentation explained some of the ideas that were followed developing the site with the main mantras being that social networks are not about people but about shared objects and that you should always design for a community an not design a community.

Getting your hands dirty with HTML 5 (James Graham and Lachlan Hunt)

James and Lachlan, being very active in the WHATWG, specifying HTML5 together with the W3C walked the audience through the ideas of HTML5, why it is a good idea and went into detail about the design principles of HTML5. They then showed an example of how a simple blog layout would be defined with new HTML5 elements and what the benefits of those are. Other examples included SVG animations and video embedding without Flash and easy controls natively supported by a browser - in this case the newest Opera. The talk concluded with a call for participation in the working group.

Content Management without the killing (Drew McLellan)

Drew's talk revolved around the need for content management systems, what pitfalls to avoid when choosing one and in-depth information about a system his company built for themselves. The main takeaways were:

Humans do instinctively tend to overcomplicate things and should try to avoid this at all costs.

Things to look out for when choosing a CMS are that the system can generate clean URLs, store the data in an open format, have a customizable and accessible admin interface, allow for search, support different languages and allow for caching.

We should avoid the "pimped out blog system" - in other words we should never go live with a system that has already been tweaked and is maxed out as that will get us into a situation where we have an unsupportable configuration of a system. The main example was hacking around issues in WordPress' source code and then being unable to install security patches.

Exploring the server side - Beyond 404 (Stuart Langridge)

Stuart's talk covered all the different HTTP error codes and what they mean for your site. He started by explaining 404 and how you should make sure that you know about missing pages on your server by getting emailed every time an error like that occurs. Stuart also explained how to use custom 404 pages to simulate a mod_redirect available on Apache Servers inside IIS servers. This was the first of a massive amount of great tips how to track the behaviour of your web site on an HTTP level and it would be tedious to repeat those here. Check the talk and the podcasts will be available soon.

Hot Topics Panel (moderated by Jeffrey Veen, with Indi Young, Bronwyn Jones,Andy Clark and Dan Rubin)

The official day schedule (before we repaired to the main hall for drinks and general networking) ended with a "Hot Topics" panel of the experts answering questions of the audience. These ranged from the relationship of developers and designers over the mobile web as a new design challenge up to whether the experts had seen the new Indiana Jones movie and what they thought about it.

Summary

Day one of the conference was a very design-oriented mix while tomorrow will be more catered to the development side of things. It was interesting to see how a lot of best practices promoted on the Yahoo Developer Network made their way into other companies or seeing that similar approaches become more and more the norm. From a networking perspective, @media was once again a goldmine. London as a location attracts developers from all over Europe and it is great to share experiences and ideas and learn about the rules of markets you are not savvy about.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network