/ SPEAKING, WEB-DESIGN

AjaxWorld - Day 3

This last day started off being able to sleep in, but it quickly went downhill when the promised breakfast arrived 45min late. Nevertheless, I did glean a few bits of good information, and only had to walk out of a few sessions. I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but some of the content of the sessions was more like an infomercial than a learning environment. Enough of my rant, on to the tidbits.

Social Networks as a Tool

We use social networks everyday to accomplish our jobs. How can we utilize the power of social networks in an computerized environment. Look at your job through the eyes of a social network. In other words, what pieces of information do individual’s own.

Social networks can help me as a software developer produce higher quality of code.

  • How: Create tools that utilize the group. For instance, FxCop can produce a list of broken rules when it runs. These broken rules can be placed into a central repository. Then the entire group can access the rules and fix the code. The trick is to make it easy to select a rule, get the code, and make the fix. Bam. Almost like ants doing a little bit of work to get a big job done.
  • Groups are nodes. Treat group on the graph just like a regular node. It will have its own resources and connections and events. Groups can be used to manage projects
  • See Ning.

JQuery - Modular Code

A few people got their feelings hurt when Yehuda Katz changed his presentation from an introduction to JQuery to a more advanced talk on how to write modular code with JQuery. I enjoyed the talk albeit Yehuda rushed through the talk due to his 15 minute tardiness.

  • Use the Addon .listener, .intercept to bind events.
  • Bind to a higher element than lots of lower elements
  • Use Event Messaging
  • Think in High Level Events. Instead of e.keycode == 38 do .trigger(‘uparrow_clicked’)
  • See LiveQuery. This allows you to bind events to all DIV even if they are not on the page yet. Useful for dynamic text via a widget
  • See

Become a good Presenter

Walking away from this conference it was easy to spot the great presenters from the lousy ones. Great presenters do the following:

  • Prepare quality Content
  • Format a clean unique presentation
  • Know the audience
  • Don’t repeat the exact same general information someone else already covered.
  • Have quality content
  • Don’t be an infomercial

The lousy presenters did basically the opposite

  • Show no emotion
  • Mumble
  • Appear as though you just saw the content
  • Put lots of text on each slide
  • Have misleading presentation titles in attempts to lure unsuspecting attendees
  • Have poor content

That’s about it. I’m about to get on the plane and leave beautiful San Jose and look forward to putting to practice the real gems of the conference.