Having not read the session description ahead of time, I was expecting this to be all about browser hacking in the narrow sense: specific tricks, workarounds, and hacks. Instead, it was a much more interesting talk about why this approach to feature development is vital to the web itself.

We are in the midst of an incredible acceleration in the variety of technologies vying to serve as our interface to the cloud. Dillard did a great job characterizing the forces at play (standard vs proprietary, open vs. closed.) He then explained the complicated role that technical hacks play in this ecosystem, since they can both allow developers to adopt standards before browsers support them, and at the same time push the standards themselves (treading dangerously in the territory of proprietary feature sets.)

His advice to developers boiled down to this: Don’t wait for standards, but hack as dangerously close as you can to the bleeding edge of where you think the open web is headed. The most valuable hacks are the ones that bring future standards to today’s (and yesterday’s) browsers.

Do Try This at Home: Ajax Bookmarking, Cross-site Scripting, and Other Web 2.0 Browser Hacks
Development, room 2003, Friday 3:50 PM
Brian Dillard (Pathfinder Associates)

My rough notes are after the jump.

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This was the one-year follow-up after Steve Souders did his first presentation (at last year’s Web 2.0) on optimizing the performance of frontends. He’s done some amazing work collecting best practices, including a whole decision tree on the best methods to inject script into a page, based on browsers, the need to access scripts cross-domain, etc.

As far as immediate applicability to my work at Instructables, this was by far the most interesting talk of the conference for me. Rough notes after the jump.

Even Faster Web Sites
Focus on Web Operations, room 2002, Friday 1:30 PM
Steve Souders (Google)

Here’s a link to the slides. As a preview, below is the money shot: a full decision tree for how and when to use any one of six different methods for dynamic script inclusion:

In addition, I had a very interesting conversation with badass engineer/analyst Artur Bergman who has suggested some ninja moves to get us past the the external script loading problems that we’re having at Instructables. I’d previously been stumped, so this may be something of a coup.

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Moveon.org placed an open call for 30-second ad spots supporting Obama’s run for the presidency, soliciting over 1000 entries from across the country. They then created an Am-I-Hot-or-Not-style interface to allow people to jump in an vote for handfuls of spots at time. After nearly 5 million votes, the pool has been narrowed to 15 finalists. This was crowdsourcing at its best.

Here are two of my favorites:

I’m not sure why the cheesy all-American nature of these appeals to me. Maybe because I know it will appeal to those whose minds can still be changed.

This was a great talk by Gregg Pollack, who’s a big Ruby on Rails evangelist. Here, he makes his case for TDD (Test-Driven Development) in general, and a new form of it called BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) which he hearts. The live-coding was fun (it always seems fun, with Rails) but it made for some very bad note-taking. Fortunately, I found a video online with similar content, so you can watch for yourself.

This doesn’t have immediate application at Instructables, though I’ll be looking into BDD and TDD systems that have been developed for frontend code. Rough notes and links after the jump.

The Art of Testing Web Applications
Thurs 2:40 PM, Development 2003
Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy)

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The fun project I helped out with at Saturday’s Alchemy: Origami lanterns made with “LED Throwies” stuffed inside. Here’s a photo I found:

Photo by broxtronix

Update: Stephanie took some more photos, too:

A Rilke poem, recited by Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 as he talked about the great challenges we face (and have always faced) as individuals and as a species. Something for me to hold close:

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

This was a session by Matt Jones (Dopplr) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse / fire eagle) on the past, present, and future of “data portability” and other ways in which users experience and give access to their personal data. They discussed a lot of interesting design patterns that are fundamental to our current phase of innovation. These are interactions and metaphors that don’t always come to mind when people think of the superficial aspects of Web 2.0. Rough notes after the jump.

Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
Design and User Experience 2006 Wed 9:40 AM
Matt Jones (Dopplr), Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse / fire eagle)

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This was a session by Alex Payne (Twitter) and Michal Migurski (Stamen Design, who did the Digg Labs apps) on their experiences designing, implementing, and scaling APIs. My rough notes are after the jump.

Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen
Development, room 2003, Wed 2:40 PM
Alex Payne (Twitter), Michal Migurski (Stamen Design)

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I’m hanging out at the web2.0 conference, this week, checking out occasional sessions and schmoozing. Instructables is doing free laser etching on the conference floor for your laptop/phone/genitalia.

I’m also doing a web2Open (the un-conference running parallel to the main one) session tomorrow afternoon at 12:50PM called “Coding Lazy.” It will be all about how Instructables uses tags to model Javascript dependencies in the client, and how that allows us to code at full speed while procrastinating on proper factoring and optimization for as long as possible. Stop by if you’re interested!

Here’s the Web2Open schedule. And here’s how to get a free pass.

Here’s my favorite Vin Diesel Fact so far:

Vin Diesel wears a cup not to protect himself, but to protect the players on the other team.

Tnx, Zachary