Last weekend, a few dozen developers gathered together at Viget’s beautiful offices in Reston to… talk nerdy. Out of all the conferences I’ve been to, it was one of the best. It was directly honed on developers, and all talks were targeted as such. That meant no talks about marketing, gov 2.0, branding, public relations,  blogging, twitter, or anything else social media/PR, etc. as *camps and other conferences I’ve attended recently have moved towards (I’m not counting language-specific conferences).

I had taken notes, but Peter did a better job, so read his.

A few key takeways:

• Jay Virdy, CEO of Summize, kept repeating Build something simple, let the market pull you in – Brad Burnham . As soon as he accepted that, Summize turned itself into a simple Twitter search engine, and took off.
• HTML5 will likely have standards for push notifications (a la Google Wave). Comet is a current implementation. No more of this polling shit.
• Ruby 1.9 is a huge step ahead, but will pose problems for legacy apps.
• Impromptu, Lily, PureData are pretty cool tools for manipulating sound/visuals, even by reading a website. Much cooler if you want to spring for a Monome

Some link love:

• Aaron Bedra
• Peter Harkins (+ excellent notes)
• Ben Scofield
• @developer_day
• Official Site

As I think about our bailing out Detroit, I can’t help but reflect on what, in my view, is the most important rule of business in today’s integrated and digitized global market, where knowledge and innovation tools are so widely distributed. It’s this: Whatever can be done, will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you. Just don’t think it won’t be done. If you have an idea in Detroit or Tennessee, promise me that you’ll pursue it, because someone in Denmark or Tel Aviv will do so a second later.

As the current auto industry, and it’s failure to adapt to a changing consumer, represents “Car 1.0″ – why should we sink our taxpayer dollars into saving it? When we instead could be investing in the next generation of clean tech?

While others are entrenched in how we will watch TV, and where it’s coming from. I’m more interested in what we do while watching TV, particularly integrating the social element that we have when watching a show with other people.

Looks like CBS is doing it. Here is a shot of their Social Room product. It looks like it’s made by a company called ClipSync.

First off, I love the idea.
The interface needs a ton of work. Chat seems to be an afterthought, instead it’s throwing up a whole lot of junk on one screen, with a lot of wasted space. And the primary interaction is really, really annoying.

Besides the under used chat and the quiz element on the right rail, you also can interact using one of the six icons (including the branded Intel logo). Whatever you do shows up on everyone’s screen, and there’s no way to turn it off! I spent a good 10 seconds pissing everyone off by blowing kisses all over the screen.

I urge you all to try it out. I feel this is the future, but it could definitely use some improvement.

Thanks to all the sponsors for making it possible, and CDIA for hosting. The volunteer organizers, primarily Justin, Shaun, Peter, and John, deserve an infinite amount of praise. The DC community has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year, and were it not for the efforts of people like you, we would not be where we are today, myself included. So thank you. I had attended the first planning meeting, but unfortunately I was unable to attend any others or contribute any time, and I’m sorry for that.

Leslie, Bill, and myself gave a presentation on our awesome work for C-SPAN, through our respective companies New Media Strategies and JESS3. We received great feedback, and high praise for our work throughout the rest of the day. I chose to speak on how I leveraged the codebase in a number of open source projects to turn around each of these complex and high-performing sites in a week (no, I was not kidding), and people kept on coming up to me, shocked that I was able to do that  . Slides will be posted soon.

Rather than taking a “usual” internship at a government agency or consulting company for the summer, I instead chose to stay on campus for the summer, and in addition to a lot of relaxing, worked at two amazing labs at UMD. One was the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, where I got to play around with awesome gadgets like motion tracking cameras and sensor networks. The other position, which I kept throughout the following school year, was as a researcher in the Human Computer Interaction Lab. I was tasked with working on an Java interface (using Swing) for the MALACH project, which, in a nutshell, was to allow people to browse and view a massive amount of transcripts of recordings of Holocaust victims. The recordings originated from the Shoah foundation, whose mission is to record and store all memories of survivors of the Holocaust (side note: my grandmother volunteered as one of the interviewers). So I spent the summer working under Ryen White, who now works at Microsoft Research.

As we were presented with developing an entirely new interface, we had a number of challenges. We came up with some pretty cool solutions. One thing I came up with was an interface element nicknamed PygmyBrowse. PygmyBrowse is a rather simple and easy method of bi-directional navigation of infinitely complex trees in a compact environment. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the professors around me disagreed, and suggested I pursue it further. After spending a good chunk of the semester holding user trials (in between running one of the largest student groups on campus, being actively involved in my computer, and oh yeah… double major), we ended up with an academic paper, with yours truly as the primary author. Which ended up getting accepted to a major human-computer interaction conference. Whiiich I didn’t attend, because there was one or another extra-curricular event going on (kicking myself 3 years later).

Now when you do a google search for PygmyBrowse (a lame moniker I concocted with a couple friends), it’s actually been implemented.

If I dig up the Java source code for it, I’ll release it.

You can download the PDF of my paper here, or view it on Scribd.

TechCrunch, the best tech blog out there, just reported on it. C-SPAN is still ironing out some last issues, but IT’S ALIVE!

Read it.

A very big moment!

Much more to come about it later.

I’ve been noticing for a while that, since graduating from college where I had to memorize programming languages, I learn less and less. Why should I bother to memorize the ins and outs of every system when instead I can just do a quick google search and find what I need?

As a web designer/developer, am I contributing to this? Is this a good thing or bad thing? And how can we combat it, or accept it?

I read an article today about FireRift – this seems exactly what I was looking for out of a content management system.

Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or
develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the
site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your
code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the
corresponding function.

Really looking forward to this, as should any frustrated web developer.

We’re just wrapping up a planning meeting for BarcampDC2, here at Murky Coffee. We are looking for sponsors and such, and soon opening it up to people to register. If you have an idea or are interested in sponsoring, check out the wiki here!

BarcampDC was a pretty big turning point for me. Having lived in the DC area for so many years, I had never even thought about reaching out to the tech community in the area – I wasn’t even aware it existed. It was there I met Ann, Justin, Keith, John, (the four of whom are sitting here planning the event with me) and many others, whom I consider mentors, colleagues, business partners, and friends. There is no doubt that where I am today is a direct effect of showing up that morning and talking to people.

If you are in the area, come on out!

• Facebook payments platform
• Facebook Connect
• Three tier application system

We’ll have to see what happens, but….

• The Facebook payments platform will only work is if it is ridiculously easy to pay for something. However, with increased ease of use comes decreased security. My girlfriend has access to my Facebook account. My friends leave themselves signed into my computer occassionally. I leave work signed in to Facebook. No-one regards their Facebook account as particularly sensitive, maybe at most somewhere in between e-mail and your online bank account. How can this be secure, yet usable?
• It will be nearly impossible to have premium applications that cost money. With the barrier to entry for a Facebook application, free knockoffs relying just on advertising will replace it.
• There will be a run on Facebook enabling e-commerce stores, assuming Facebook allows this.
• The tiered application system will be interesting. I have thought for a while that their needs to be a premium tier, where application developers can pay a certain fee to have better listing/support/features. With the top tier limited to a few applications by the top developers, most applications will be fighting not to hit the bottom tier.
• Facebook Connect… that will be cool.

One feature I wanted to have is a display of whatever I am up to in the online world. I wanted, to start out with, aggregate my Flickr, Tumblr, blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. In the future, I may add more.

I played with a few different tools for this to run off of, including FriendFeed. In the end, I decided on building my own with Yahoo! Pipes, both as an exercise, and in order to closely control how it works. Yahoo Pipes can be powerful, but at the same time cumbersome to work with.

It took a lot of tinkering around, but I finally got it to work

Then I made a minor variation to it, to show the one most recent item out of each. This way I can show them all together, if I choose to.

I plan on modifying these pipes so you can customize it for yourself at some point in the near future.

Having started out hacking out sites in phpNuke way back in the day, then b2 (the predecessor to Wordpress, that’s how old school I am), and moving to mainly Wordpress and a little bit of Drupal, not to mention numerous homebrewed solutions for client sites, I had a laundry list of things I was looking for.

Here’s what is awesome.

• Custom Field Groups – When you are building a site, most pages have more than one block of text. It’ll have some content boxes on the side, intro text, images, etc. While, say, Wordpress, is only really is suitable for having a title and a main body of text, in EE you can build sets of content, and assign them to specific template pages. This makes it ridiculously easy to build out and administer complex pages.
• Separation of content and display. ExpressionEngine handles organization and entry of the content. The template, when called, pulls any content it requires from the database. Most content management systems work vice versa, where templates are called to display specific pieces of content.
• PHP-less templates. I had gotten used to telling my web designers to avoid touching anything between <? and ?> . EE uses template tags that resemble Smarty. And, in my opinion, is easier for a non-developer to understand.
• Minimal need for plug-ins. Because it has so much built in, there isn’t that much need for them.
• There are a ton of other suprises – you’ll really only learn if you work your way through the tutorial.

But:

• It’s not free. You can download a free version to learn off of, but if you want it for commercial use, it’s $250 bucks. It seems pricey, but for what you are getting in the short and long run, it’s a drop in the bucket.
• Building a site in EE relies heavily on wiring things up in the control panel (the tutorial spends 75% of the time in there), which can be confusing and often mind-numbing.
• Because of that, it’s hard to rely directly develop the design and the site together. The design should be set and all CSS/HTML completed before you even think about firing this up.
• While, yes, it can run blogs, it was built as a general-purpose CMS. If your site is primarily a blog, I would still recommend using Wordpress or MovableType.

Mindy over at Viget has a great write-up of switching from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. She points out some of the same issues, and gave some great pieces of advices for those used to Wordpress.

Looking to start out in ExpressionEngine? Download the core edition, and then pop over to Boyink’s tutorial. It’s a whopping 17 chapters, with a lot of repetition, but it is worth it to really lock down the cycle of building templates, weblogs, field groups, etc.

One of the ideas I had come up with was a tool called YesterdayI. YesterdayI was based on a simple purpose: just write a short passage about what you did the day before. Meant as a lifestreaming tool, you would end up forming a series of small blog posts, a daily journal of sorts. Microblogging.

I built it, but, as is so common in the world of small web applications, I did a half-assed job at launching it (I’m a rockstar designer/developer, not a marketing guru), no-one used it, and by then I was already on to the next cool idea. So here it stands, frozen in time, lingering on some web-host I have set to auto-renew.

Then Twitter came, followed in suit by a dozen copycats, and made microblogging a household term. Now of course, Twitter serves an entirely different purpose, and has a whole host of features I never had thought of. But it’s always interesting to see how I was on a similar track.

I’m not complaining that someone stole my idea. I may have missed the boat on this one, but at the same time, I am well aware that ideas alone don’t matter. It’s about execution, marketing, positioning, and being in the right place at the right time.

It would be interesting to rebuild this, and see where it could go from there…

Also interesting to see how much my skills have changed since then. From the elementary javascript to table-heavy design (not to mention a generally ugly design), it’s always great to take a look back at past work and critique it, just like an author may look back at an old text or an artist look at one of their earlier works.

One of the topics that really interests me is the last mile.

We have electronic devices that store and deal with pretty much any type of information. Phone numbers, addresses, messages, people, etc. Fridges that keep track of our food, even.

But how do they all connect? They don’t.

When will all of them communicate? When will, the moment I accept an appointment, show up in my phone, calendar, GPS, e-mail, etc? I can think of a million more examples.

Will microformats make a difference?

One of the great things about developing third-party applications on Facebook and other platforms is that everything related to user authentication is handled for you.

$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

All a developer has to do is toss in that one line of code, and all user authentication is handled for you.

When building web applications, I’ve spent way too much time dealing with user authentication, profile registration, logging in, logging out, etc. There are lots of tutorials for this, but in the end, you always have to figure it out yourself.

I want to start an open source project that will create a dead-simple user management system, so all a developer has to do is call one line of code, and everything else will be taken care of for them.  I’m calling it the Picket Fence Project.

I also want it to be easily configurable, and it to allow you to log in (optionally) with:

• OpenID - which is way too complicated to implement on your lonesome
• Facebook - If they can log in with their Facebook account, great
• Anything else – whatever other auth systems become available.

Of course, if this is already out there, great. Just tell me

And if you are a PHP rockstar with some extra cycles, let me know.

In 362 days, we’re going to have a new president. We’re mired right now with candidates of both parties yammering about their platforms, attacking each other (since when did being called a Muslim get considered an insult?), and telling us what we think is important.

But what do you think is important? I was told of a site, On Day One, that asks you just that. People can submit their ideas for what they want the president to do right from the get-go. Pretty cool use of technology to assist politics – now if only someone would start paying attention.

Here’s what I wrote.

As I’m browsing through the many submissions, one thing really resonates. Almost all of them are related to undoing the actions of the past seven years. Did this happen during the clinton years? The previous Bush years? Have we ever, in the history of our nation, been so looking forward to the current president being out of here that we started trying to figure out who will replace him more than two years before?

362 days, 6 hours, 32 minutes to go.

Many believe that Israel is a perfect country for testing electric cars, due to the short distances between major cities, its entrepreneurial prowess, and its unique geopolitical needs.

Will Israel be the first country to be fully electric? Israel is already leading the way in solar technology. Story here and here. See more about Project Better Place. I think this organization could have real power in the coming years.

GetMetroTimes.com is a FREE service that allows you to quickly and easily check when the next metro train is arriving at your nearest station. You can check it online, or on your cell phone with just a quick text message! We charge you absolutely nothing, however your provider may charge you normal text messaging rates.

Additionally, I made some backend improvements to handle a wider array of queries. For example, to get the station info for College Park, you could type in coll, cOllEGe, collegepark, college park, collegepa, and similar variations. Have fun, and let me know if you break it!

FYI: Metro currently offers an online station monitor, as well as a WAP site, and Justin told us about an iPhone specific site. I created this because no service is currently offered that does this via text message, and it solves a real pain myself and many others have! Enjoy!

Daft Punk – Alive 2007

Wish I was there.

They shut down the store nearest me in Maryland a while back. It was replaced by a Micro Center, a chain I had never heard of.

To put it simply, they nailed it. A haven for both geeks and non-geeks. The place is clean, and well stocked with anything you would ever need. The staff is helpful and friendly (they have a novel system for ensuring that). A far cry from CompUSA.

What is more interesting for me is the promotional tactics used to get people in the store. They mailed almost everyone in the area a coupon for a free branded thumb drive or memory card. Just for walking in the door. I had no interest previously in checking out the store, but it got me in there. And I’ve since spent a ridiculous amount of money there, so it worked for them! I’ve seen tactics like that before, but on top of the coupon they sent to you, they attached a similar companion coupon to give to a friend. That’s awesome. What a great viral way to have people advertise for you.

They have done a great job of keeping people visiting brick and mortar stores, and their approach will hopefully be echoed by other chains.

And, especially important for me, their return policy is awesome .