Barcamp Dallas Recap

So, after a long flight from San Francisco I arrive in Dallas Friday evening for my first Barcamp. I was tired, exhausted and not very enthusiatic about chewing up my weekend. I was also a little intimidated, I'm a designer, I work for Microsoft and quite frankly development is not my bag. I was afraid I would be bored silly or that I wouldn't have much to contribute. I was compeletely wrong.

Before I came to Microsoft I remember spending alot of time reading blogs about Microsoft like Mini Microsoft (any company that can fight like a family at Thanksgiving on a Web site gets my vote--although I disagree with the view that MS needs to get smaller, it probably needs to get to 140k to properly handle it's ambitions and market potential, I'll save my reasoning on this for a future post so readers have time to sharpen sticks). I also looked at sites like Scobleizer and this post in particular.

At the end of the day I suspect that the reason alot of folks like me are at Microsoft are in large part because of Scoble, he humanized this company like no other, but I'm not sure I 'got' what 'got' him until this Barcamp. Barcamps and their other brethren are where opportunity, serendipity and passion all come to meet. It's a powerful and energizing combination that recharged my batteries.

My hightlights of the event were getting a chance to reconnect with Caleb Jenkins, the primary driver of sponsoring this event when he was at Microsoft and meeting a bunch of people I wouldn't normally get a chance to, including folks like:

Giovanni Gallucci of the Agency Blog

Erica O'Grady of Creativerse and ReinventingErica

Jim Young of Jambo

Kinan Sweidan of Ximda and  Tektactic

William Hurley of Whurley

Christopher St. John at Architectonic

This is just the smallest list of folks too (you can see all the folks who attended here) including fellow Hawkeyes from the University of Iowa.

Other personal highlights were seeing the SWARC guys. Which of course means the South Western Alliance of Robotic Combat, duh. Some of the stuff these guys were creating just put my rudimentary lego skills to shame. Rember these are the poeple that will save us when the zombies come. Other highlights included a late night debate and battle royale on the subject of 'service' versus 'systems' (you had to be there) and actually getting the chance to present my own session on user experience. Now, to be honest, I did my best to take off my Microsoft hat here for this session but that's pretty hard to do (and we are in an MS office to boot) but I think my presentation sparked some of the best debate of the Barcamp.

Much of our debate focused on in-browser versus rich client experiences and which will become more predominant in the coming years Short answer is that companies that can do BOTH (ie BIG) will do both to optimize and differentiate experience across channels and touchpoints and that smaller outfits will probably focus on the browser and cross-platform experiences out of necessity and speed to market.

Perhaps one thing that was of most interest to me was how attached to platforms and tools we have become and how we so think we are in a zero sum game when it comes to development. I look at the eco-system of Ruby, LAMP, .net and J2EE and see nothing but opportunity for all us and I see the practitioner that will succeed in the long term will be the one that picks the most appropriate tools for the job and understands that those tools and skills will be in a contant state of flux. If I thought like some developers I know I'd still be banging out animations in Electric Image 2.5 and a doing rotoscoping in Commotion 1.0. (Both great programs BTW but I've moved on).

I was also interested in the current nature of the attention that we give simplicity in Web 2.0 applications. One subject we actively debated was how the Web 2.0 will scale and add complexity using the existing models for Web development and also what actually motivates large companies when they market software (features or, my future contention, functionality AND user experience).

All in all a fantastic event and I'm looking forward to seeing all of these folks again at South by SouthWest in March.

Overheard...(and all true)

"I heard that Circuit City is actually giving away Zunes."

"No that's not true, they are actually giving you $10.00 to TAKE one."

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"So yeah, when I proposed that an AI would manage and track the denial of service attacks some of my friends suggested that I had obviously not seen Terminator III."

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"You know, after today I'm actually intrigued enough to install Vista and install Office 2007 and see what it's like."

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Updates: You can download a PDF of the presentation I gave at Barcamp Dallas called What is UX? (About 1 meg).

Comments

[Kinan]

Thank you Chris for an amazing presentation. Your presentation inspired me to install MS Vista ... something I thought I would never do :) see you at SXSW

[Adam Keys]

Chris, great slides. I've been trying to enlarge the UX side of my brain and your presentation was hugely helpful in that pursuit. Thanks!