Here’s an update on our BKWLD goes to conferences initiative, where I attempt to suss out the merits and value of conferences.  We went to FITC SF the other month and I realized I never posted about An Event Apart Seattle back when we went to it (in April), so I’ll cover both in this post.

An Event Apart was great.  At the time I didn’t fully realize it’s value.  I felt like for every hour plus session there were only a couple nuggets I took away.  For the two days spent, a handful of moments didn’t seem worth it.  But I’ve really gotten my mileage out of examples of CSS2 techniques that were still relevant, CSS3 properties I didn’t realize had reached wide adoption, and ammo to argue the importance of planning for mobile.  I hadn’t made time to dig my hands into HTML5 canvas at that point and I can attribute the conference with spurning the ideas that went into an article in the latest issue of .Net magazine.  The speakers were also as entertaining as they were informative.  So I’ll recommend we go to An Event Apart again.  Oh, the food was really good also.  And the seats were super comfortable (with desk surfaces and power for laptops), although it was a tad oversold.

FITC had it’s ups and downs.  There were a number of engaging presentations that weren’t very educational.  These were things like speakers showing off portfolio work and experiments.  It was fun (even inspiring) eye candy, but with little discussion of how the work was done.  There were also some presentations we walked out on because the concepts being addressed were too novice-y.  On the other hand, there were some great panels concerning technical explanations of tools I’d heard about but hadn’t tried out yet.  Joa Ebert showed off his Apparat tool for optimizing and compressing swfs.  Colin Moock explained Union, a platform for creating multiuser web apps in Flash and JS (I’m very excited to use it on a project).  I also saw an interesting presentation on doing voice recognition in Flash, an overview of Unity 3D, and tracking colored dots with a webcam for augmented reality style stuff.  The location wasn’t great, it was really off the beaten path in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco.  So getting back into town was a cab ride.  And cabs were slow to show up.

So on the whole, I think we’ll do a careful reading of what the panels are before we decide whether to attend FITC next year.  If it was located closer, that would sway things as well.  Perhaps part of the reason An Event Apart struck a cord with me was because it was also more convenient.

Google Calendar for scheduling projects:

At the heart of our scheduling setup is Google Calendar. Each employee at BKWLD has a calendar, and this is where we assign people to a project for each day of the week. The point here is to provide a broad overview of every employee’s week, not to provide granular details of specific milestones or todos. Each Friday Dan and I cover who is working on what for the following week and input it in GC on that employees calendar. We keep it high level, listing only the project name, and one or two words of what employee is working on, such as  ”Project name, flash dev.” If someone is out for vacation, it goes here too. In order to have access to coworker’s calendar’s just add them on your GC homepage under “add a coworker’s calendar” by entering their email address. Here is a screenshot of GC settings tab. You can sell the coworker’s calendars that I have access to edit, and other that I can only view. :

Google Calendar for day-to-day tasks

As producer, I’ll also use Google calendar to schedule internal meetings, client calls, or events outside of work for all us Buk folk, such as Ignite Seattle, the NW Pinball Show, or our upcoming Paintball outing. I know some producers prefer to use iCal for scheduling meetings, but I like Google Calendar because everyone invited can see the relevant info directly on the invitation, instead of having to open the invite in iCal to view the time, location, call-in number, ect. I’ve found that many clients don’t use iCal so it’s nice to have a tool that’s browser based.

Managing project milestones in Basecamp

At BWKLD we use Basecamp for most of our projects. At kickoff a producer will add the milestones from a project schedule to BC. From there, everyone assigned to the project can view the milestones and have visibility to both their portion of the project, and the overall scope. We also assign milestones directly to employees in bc. This is important because both Google calendar and basecamp milestones, as well as Unfuddled milestones, sync to iCal. To subscribe to a milestone calendar in basecamp, just go to the milestones tab, and click on the “subscribe to iCalendar” in red. You can subscribe to a global iCalendar where you’ll see all the milestones for each project, but I prefer to subscribe to each project individually. The advantage to subscribing to individual iCalendars is that iCal allows you to color code each project’s iCalendar different. This is really helpful if you are working on multiple projects concurrently. Check out this link for more info:

Using calDav within iCal to sync it all together

Now you can sync google calendars and basecamp to iCal. Consequently, by looking at iCal you will have ONE place to look to see the following:

a) events from your own google cal (meeting invites and your schedule on a daily level)

b) calendar of other people you have access to on google calendar (helpful if you are ever making a schedule or want to see who is working on what)

c) all milestones from any basecamp projects you’ve subscribe to. If the dates are ever changed in basecamp, just refresh iCal and you’ll see new dates updated.

It’s great to have one place to look to see how the project milestones from basecamp are lining up with individual employees schedule. To set this up, follow the steps here for syncing using calDAV on iCal Desktop by following this link and clicking on “Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal”:

Recap:

Below is a screenshot of how your iCal will look after you’ve done all the setup:

On the top you’ll see Dave.Brown@bkwld.com – this is my BKWLD google calendar only. This is where I’ll see my meeting invites, and receive pop-up reminders throughout the day for upcoming meetings.

Next down is Gmail – this is a personal calendar, so by checking this box I’ll see anything personal. Helpful when I’m checking to see how a travel schedule lines up with  my personal life. I also add my wife’s calendar so we’re all synced up too.

Next down is Delegates. This is the list of all the people you’ve added on Google calendar under “add coworker’s calendars.” If you want to add/modify these settings directly in iCal, go to preferences>Accounts>Delegation.

Finally is Subscriptions – this is the list of projects subscribed to on basecamp. We’ve also be using Unfuddled at BKWLD recently and you can also subscribe to individual calendars through Unfuddled.

Now you’ll have complete access to all the info you’ll need for any project, easily accessible for a project. If someone asks you “who is assigned to x project and can I move them help on project y” you can easily see who is working on each project, look at when the next milestone is due, and see who else may be available to help based off of current workload.

Syncing with iPhone

You can also setup calDAV on your iphone so you will be able to keep your iCal and iphone calendars kept in sync wirelessly. You’ll be able to add/modify event made in Google Calendar on either you iCal desktop or iCal on iPhone without having to do a physical sync. Here’s how to setup CalDav on your iPhone:

Regarding seeing your Basecamp milestones on your iPhone the best option is simply periodically doing a physical sync between iTunes and your iPhone. Within iTunes you can choose which calendars you want to sync by going to the info tab> Sync iCal Calendars and selecting them there. This works for me because I often do a physical sync daily to update my podcasts and other content. Frankly we don’t move milestone dates around that often, so doing a physical sync every few days works out fine.

My favorite thing about this setup is that everyone involved in a project has the info they need. All devs and designers know when the next milestone is due for each of their projects. As Mr. Dan Fields would say, “Project Managed.”

This is because the debate is centered around technologies and programming languages. This strife is very prevalent in all areas of the web design industry. Should you use Flash or Javascript for that slideshow? Should we connect to this MySQL database, or this SQL server over here? .NET or PHP? There are some very opinionated groups, which is too bad because all of these technologies are amazing in their own right.

At the core of every project is an idea, and that is by far the most important thing to consider. Once the creative idea has been set, realizing that idea can happen any number of unique and innovative ways.

When figuring out how to produce the project, it’s all about what technology is best suited for the design. How much interactivity will it have? Of course you’re not going to utilize Flash for a site that is just plain, static text, and you’re not going to link up to a database when your site consists of two pages.

After these things have been sorted out, then pick the technology that you are most comfortable and efficient with. For example, I work really well in Flash and Actionscript. I am very comfortable with the language, and it comes naturally to me. That doesn’t mean that Flash should be used for everything, but in at the end of the day it’s all about the idea being produced, —not what technology was used to make it. If you need a slideshow, it can be written in Javascript, Flash, or hell even Lingo, as long as you end up with a killer slideshow.

It’s also not about the newest technology; it’s it’s about the best technology. My old college instructor is a professional type designer for a 1st-class graphic design agency. She stands by Freehand as the best tool out there for type and letterform design. It’s not a new program by any measure, but it works for her, and she produces some incredible work.

So we need to relax about the technology debates, and focus on making kick- ass designs, and have fun doing it.

We went to StackOverflow’s Dev Days earlier this year.  One big plus of it was it’s cost: $100 a head.  The speakers gave us an overview of technologies that we don’t use regularly (there wasn’t a lot of LAMP love) and the FogBuzz keynote made me realize that some of the issues we’ve faced in the growth of ground(ctrl) and Elastic aren’t unique to us.  Which brings us to SXSW, which 6 of us just back from.

We brought a pretty big team to SXSW and it works there since the conference is so multidisciplinary.  During the day we split up often, so that people could meet with other folks who were there or attend panels specific to their interests.  As anyone who is our friend on Gowalla will attest (sorry for all the spam), we “checked in” to let each other know where we were.  Some of the panels I enjoyed the most were on iPhone UI design, new methods of tactile interaction, and the marketing strategy behind the Bing launch.  I was able to meet some the Appcelerator dev’s at the meetup they held, which was a great opportunity for me to ask them questions.  During the night we caroused between the free parties that different companies held (Pure Volume, Gowalla, etc).

So will we go again? I think so.  In talking with our crew, it sounds like we unanimously agreed that the panels lacked enough depth.  Many were overviews or stated the obvious too much.  There wasn’t enough detail and brainy insight.  That being said, there was usually a tidbit or two I picked up from the panels I attended.  And, there was a lot of value in getting time with coworkers in a stress free environment.  As opposed to doing some extracurricular activity (like our snowboard trip in December), the framework of a conference focused our conversation on work themed stuff, spurning creativity and new ideas.  I think this last point is what would have me taking us back again.  While we could plan a fun activity locally for a much lower cost, having a structure based on learning (even if it fell short) is special about going to a conference and led to growth outside of the sessions.

Next up for us is An Event Apart in Seattle.  If your company is thinking of going to industry events and you want to chat about whether it’s worth the cost or not (I’m still chewing on this myself), hit me up in the comments.