From December 9th to December 12th, there is a new web developer conference in Las Vegas called Dev Intersection (www.devintersection.com) which I encourage everyone to attend.  The people running it and the speakers are mostly people I have met on the typical Microsoft conference circuit and they are all good speakers and really nice guys.  Having said that, what I really want to do is make fun of this conference.  Please don’t take anything I say below for constructive criticism, folks, cause it ain’t – this is trolling pure and simple.

The conference is devoted to Visual Studio and ASP.NET – Microsoft’s main tool and platform for building web sites.  It seems to have been organized by people who were not invited to DevConnections but I’m probably wrong about that since the speakers are pretty much the same sort of speakers we find at DevConnections or Visual Studio Live!  More about that later.

If you are promising to teach people about web sites, it would be a good idea to actually build a good web site for your event – which has not been done here.  The main page’s speaker carousel actually blinks at you as it rotates between the different speakers.  The neon-purple logo, fortunately, does not – but really, purple, teal and yellow do not a color palate make.  There is also a general cacophony of fonts competing for attention on this page and a complementary issue with spacing in different quadrants on the page. 

In the header, we find a list of sponsors separated out by pipes – by convention this indicates links, but in this case it doesn’t.  If you click on any of these sponsor links at the top, they instead take you to the registration page.  There is also a register button at the right of the main page but, strangely, that button is absent from all of the other pages on the site.  There is no registration link in the navigation menu at the top, though. So if you actually navigate deeper into the site, the only way to register for the event is to click on one of the sponsors at the top.  Interestingly, in the spirit of ignoring well established web conventions, the home link on the navigation menu is the right-most item rather than the left-most as one would expect.

A lesser fault is the vertical gradient used for the page’s background which unfortunately isn’t tall enough and repeats itself if you scroll down the page.  These things happen.  Less forgivable is the fact that if you browse to the main page in a mobile browser, you just get the exact same page scaled down so the whole thing fits into your browser but is unreadable.  Note to the site designers – in 2012 people are going to browse your site with their phones!

So after finding a link to the registration site, what do we get? A page that has never met a grid layout. Cramped, misaligned, and with no regard for readability or ease of use. The phone number fields are three separate text boxes that you can type anything you want into – no use of commonly available jquery plugins for masking. Not even any attempt to automatically tab you to the next text box. Perhaps it all got used up doing the rollovers on the navigation menu and there was no javascript left over for masking – or dropdowns for country, city and zip for that matter. And Ajax? Fuhgeddaboudit. This site is an ajax free zone.

One of my favorite features of the site is the FAQ page and in particular a link provided for people who want to register for the event.  Where does the registration link go?

It’s a big gotcha!  You were supposed to select one of the sponsors listed in the header, remember?!!?!  Of course, it is good form to actually have a custom error page rather than letting IIS throw up a nasty default page but … hey … this conference is for developers, not designers, right?

My absolute favorite page, however, is the speaker page.  The color scheme here, unlike on the main page, is clearly lighter toned.

And as I scroll down the speaker page, it looks the way I imagine the northern barrier from A Game of Thrones would look: an unrelenting wall of white.  Dev Interactions is possibly the whitest conference of the year.

Gender-wise, though, they are doing fine and the conference seems to have a file folder full of women to pick from – there are three.

Not that I want to suggest that the organizers are racist, sexist, or chauvinistic in any way.  I know they aren’t.  The organizers of Dev Interactions explain very clearly why they have the speakers they do on the FAQ page with the broken link:

“We're bringing together some of the best speakers (and our personal friends) for a conference…”

I do, however, think that they need to expand their circle of friends. 

There is a set of events which includes Visual studio Live!, DevConnections and now DevIntersection which gets reliable Microsoft backing and is made up of a mutual-appreciation society that goes back to the 90’s.  These are people who, when Microsoft Marketing said that technologies like Silverlight, SOAP, Card Spaces (remember that one?), J#, DNA or DHTML were the thing to do would quickly hop on these technologies and dependably start championing them.

Remarkably, this mutual-appreciation society has helped one another out since the late 90’s to get out of actual development.  Today they are all professional disseminators, promoters and managers of Microsoft technologies who no longer have to go through the painful task of actually getting things to work – they have very little in common, that is, with the sorts of people who actually come to these events.

At the same time, these are also the people who tell Microsoft what is going in the world of development and I sometimes feel that this may be the source of the disconnect between Microsoft and the hundreds of thousands of developers who use their tools.  All communication between Microsoft and the developer base is mediated by these same experts who have been around since the last millennium.  Not that the mutual-appreciation society is completely static – Daniel Vaughan seems to have been replaced by John Papa, while Charlie Petzold is off doing his own thing and Miguel Castro has stepped into the vacuum he has left on the speaking circuit.  But you get the gist.

Meanwhile, all the cool stuff on the web is being done elsewhere and those going to events like this are only going to learn how to rebuild that same old site they have been maintaining since the late 90’s.  Not that that’s a bad thing.  Technology is like fashion and eventually all things old become new again, just like javascript. 

If only the DevIntersection site would make better use of javascript…

On the 6th of August, the Atlanta community put on a conference called ReMIX South based loosely on the aspirations of the MIX conference held each year in Las Vegas to highlight new technology, web design and other stuff.

Here are some quick statistics – we had roughly 438 attendees at ReMIX this year.  We also had 23 speakers and lots of sponsors onsite.

ReMIX garnered an estimated 2000 tweets – estimated because our archive programs capped out at 1500.  ReMIX apparently managed to trend nationally on August 6th on Twitter.

We tried our best to make the conference primarily about the attendees, the speakers and the sponsors.

Now that the event is over, however, I would like to take a moment to thank the people who put the conference together in roughly six weeks.

The main organizers were Cliff Jacobson, Sean Gerety, Dennis Estanislao, Farhan Rabbi, and Wells Caughey.

In addition, we had great logistical help from Corey Schuman, Linda Gerety, Ted Jacobson and Glen Gordon as the event unfolded and in the post-event period.

Additional help was provided by Joel Johnson, Ginny Caughey, Jonathan Marbutt and Shawn Wildermuth during the phone garage and also by Erin Gerety, Sophia Ashley, Paul Ashley, and Sharesh Vadali who put the registration packets together the night before ReMIX.

I want to highlight some of the skills and labor the organizers put towards the event.  They all did more than I can possibly recall, but certain things stand out.

Cliff Jacobson took care of our finances, as well as all the negotiating with the hotel, logistical planning with the hotel and A/V.  It was a lot and we basically just piled more responsibilities on him as the event approached since he never seemed to say no.  In short, the event never would have happened without his organizational skills.  In the post-event period, Cliff has also taken on the editing of our video footage and – as far as we can tell – has only had 3 hours of sleep a night for several weeks.

Sean Gerety used his persuasive powers to bring together an amazing UX track, organize the speaker dinner, and smooth over the bumps.  Sean is one of the best connected people in the Microsoft UX community and we used his connections for all they were worth.

Dennis Estanislao designed and maintained our website, which was the anchor for the event and, until the day of the event itself, perhaps the only proof that ReMIX South was actually happening.  As many people have learned in the past, a good website is the backbone of a good conference and keeping it up to date and accurate is a fulltime job.

Farhan Rabbi was essential to making this a true cross-discipline and bi-partisan event.  Throwing a conference that is attractive to both microsoft as well as non-microsoft people, attractive to both CRUX and developers, is no easy task.  Putting the lie to Kipling’s statement that never the twain shall meet, Farhan made sure that ReMIX was both ecumenical and catholic while at the same time gathering all the local talent for the amazing HTML5 track.

Wells Caughey threw himself into doing whatever was needed to get us over the finish line.  In addition to pulling together the mobile track (admittedly the most difficult of the tracks to plan and find speakers for) he also managed our commons area.

Linda Gerety handled the registration for us, staying up late the night before to prepare and manning the tables the whole day.  Corey Schuman manned the registration tables, took photos of the event, and is helping to get the recordings we managed to capture of the talks up for streaming.  Both Linda and Corey did airport runs for us to pick up speakers. Also thanks to Zach Pousman for the after party at Eclipse di Luna and the celebration of the world wide web’s 20th anniversary.  Thanks also to Kristina McInerny who just started helping us out spontaneously as well as Dave Ward and Ben Von Handorf for building phone apps for reMIX.

The thanks they receive for all this work is pretty much just some glass beads and a pat on the back.  If you see them around and happen to have enjoyed the remix experience, please let them know.

Glass beads also play a peripheral role in the organization of ReMIX.  The Glass Bead Game is the title of Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse’s 1943 book about an intellectual game of the future based on montage and pastiche – basically putting dissimilar things side-by-side and seeing what connections players can make between them. 

This is what we attempted to do at ReMIX.  We combined top local and national speakers presenting on a variety of technologies from both the Microsoft and non-Microsoft worlds, covering UX, design and development.  It was curated, of course – we tried to be careful to put things together we thought would work well, but still … We put all these different communities together, crossed our fingers, and waited to see what would happen.

Our thanks go out to the attendees, the speakers and the sponsors for making our version of the Glass Bead Game a great success.

We’ll be updating the www.remixsouth.com website with links to slide decks, photos and video recordings over the next weeks.  Check in frequently to get the latest changes.

This is my recurrent anxiety dream about the future of HTML5.

Ex nihilo nihil fit.  -- from a saying by Parmenides

Das Nichts selbst nichtet.  -- Heidegger