I’m sitting here in a hotel, in Wellington, the day before some of the workshops start for Webstock. Which is a conference I have been iching to get to for some time.

Now conferences can be a fantastic events, they can be very stimulating mentallly and socially. You can gain a great deal of insight, new ideas and even an increased depth of professional understanding.

They can also be a complete waste of time. Which one they are is totally up to you. The organisers, can make the conference the best in the world, but the value aspect all comes down to the individual – you.

Picking the Right Conference

The first thing is to pick a conference that will have at least one of two benefits:

1. The conference is with your peers, or
2. At least in an aspect of your work that you feel needs improvement or you just want to keep upto date on, or
3. The conference is centred around a potential client audience.

The later is especially true if you are Freelancing or running your own team. Even more so if you are prepared to speak. For example – if you specialise in Non for Profits or the like, then any conferences centreing around NFP would be a good idea to attend at least once and a while.

Mind you it’s no good going to a developer conference, for instance, if you are a designer, unless you are looking to hook up with some developers, even then I would just recommend you rock up to your local developer meetups instead.

Now you have the right conference selected, it is very important to maxise your investment of your time and money, again especial if you are paying for it yourself.

Remember a conference could be costing you from $100-$150 per hour to attend. And that’s not including lost time and productivity.

There are a number of key things you can do to maximise your time spent at the conference:

Relax

In order to retain the most information it’s important that you relax and don’t stress too much over the latest project or other work matters you have put aside to attend the conference.

Get some Sleep

Okay, we have all been guity of this one, now this is especially important if you are attending workshops, which can often be very intense. Ensure you get a good nights sleep, maybe more than you normally do. You want to be fresh and alert, remember falling asleep in a session is just burning money.

Take Notes

Unless your have a photograpic memory, note taking from the written form, peronsalised shorthand, blogging, twittering or sketch notes is very important. By taking notes you have a higher chance of retaining the information as you process it. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you will have time to review the presentations or audio recordings later, because you won’t.

Review your notes

After you have returned home, or even the evening after you have taken the notes, review them, read over them, remember what the speak said. If your notes are good, you will even be able to picture the speaker delivering the talk.

Share

Share your knowledge from the conference with others. Share your notes with others that attended. Give a talk on what you learnt. I finding having to speak on a topic is a fantastic way to re-enforce what you have just learnt. As you will want to ensure you have all the facts right.

Talk to Strangers

You know those people you sat next to. Did you talk to them during the conference. Did you introduce yourself to them. Striking up a conversation with a complete stranger is hard. However you at least have a common interest, you are in the same session.

Socialise and Network

It’s very important to socialise and network at a conference, often the most insights comes from talking to your peers. It’s true, the best converations are in the corridor. I have often skipped sessions in favour of continuing an in depth discussion with a speaker or a colleague I have just met. Also arrive early, maximise the networking time.

Picking the Right Groups

From my experience I have found, you will find five groups of people in the breaks at conferences. Picking the right group to talk to is critical.

1. The people that all know each other and will often huddle close and talk in a closed circle, watch for the closed in huddled shoulders. Avoid this group.
2. The work colleauges that are all talking shop and will instantly go silent the moment a stranger enters the group. Can be hard to break into.
3. The groups of two people talking, This is often a personal conversation so I wouldn’t interrupt these, ever. The exception here is when one of the people is making visual signs to escape.
4. The mixed group of people open to strangers joining them, that is not 1 or 2.
5. And finally the lone person, often they are just shy (like you) so why not approach them and collect a group of them.

Go to Dinner

Like networking in the breaks, a conference often doesn’t have to end after the offical events. Again often the most interesting conversations can happen in the small hours of the morning, drinking coffee on a hotel balcony. Okay this doesn’t work on developer conferences they tend to end as soon as the offical events windup.

Talk to the Speakers

You know what, not a lot of people engage in meaningful conversations with the speakers. Despite some being old hands at the circuit, they are still people too and will often be open to discussing their topic of interest.

Ask Questions

You know people do hold back asking questions at any speaking event. it’s human nature, they don’t want to appear as not knowing the subject or understanding. Asking questions during the session, if time allows, can be critical. As it’s often during these adhoc questions that the speakers will reveal their special gems of wisdom.

Move Session

If the session you are in just isn’t working for you, then get up and move.

Now if you are in the front row this can be a little embarassing, but there are ways of doing it. Better you get the most value out of the conference and goto one of the alternative sessions. What you can do is – fake you mobile ringing (which will be on vibrate) take it, wince, pack and leave. At worst you’ll get a comment from the speaker “about to much work or something”.

Don’t eat too Much

This may seem a little strange, but often at a conference there is a lot of wonderful food, and it’s usally of a very high standard. There is a big temptation to eat lots, espeically at lunch. The result is the after lunch snooze. That’s $100 down the drain.

Travel Badly Arrive Early

If you travel badly and have trouble adjusting to time zones, then I would recommend arriving a few days early to help you settle in. It’s no good arriving at the conference on the red-eye, as by day two you are just going to crash and burn, falling asleep most of the morning or afternoon away.

Hold off on Work

This one can be hard. I’m very guity of this one. Try and reduce your workload leading up to the conference so your focus can be 100% on the conference and the people attending. It’s no good if you’re mind is elsewhere on work and not the conference at hand.

Now I know there are going to do some more points that I have missed,I can just feel they are not all there. So help me out here and just add them below.

I have discussed Second Life previously. It’s the imersive 3D world by Linden Labs. It’s the type of online application that doesn’t really sit anywhere that can be categorised. With Second Life, I find you tend to visit, gain interest then leave, maybe you come back from time to time, maybe you don’t. Second Life does tend to have a high attrition rate (up to 85%).

Coming back

Recently I have revisited Second Life, mainly prompted via several factors, one being a determination to reset my avatar after a nasty griefing incident and the other because of the start up of the SIM for the The Podcast Network HQ. This time with my return to Second Life was with good size group of RL friends and associates (Cameron Reilly, Duncan Riley, Michael Newby, Sarah Issacson, Nathanael Boehm, Bronwen Clune, Kathryn Greenhill, Sue Waters, Linda Gehard, Richard Giles, John Johnston, Sue Hickton, Nick Hodge, Adam Purcell, Cait and a heap more) this does to a degree change the focus of Second Life as it becomes a real social gathering.

This got me thinking, what does Second Life want to be, seriously. It’s not just a social networking site, well in fact it does this poorly, it’s very hard to find people even if you know their avatar unless they are on you friends list or your share of common group interest. It’s an online store, but only for interests within Second Life. It’s a sex shop, but again only for Second Life. So in a way Second Life is all these things and none, its very anally focused on its own walled garden. It doesn’t seem to fit the open SNS we are all looking for.

Things are Changing

However it’s been branching out into becoming an educational facility; with various educational institutions setting up with extensive resources in Second Life. With the advent of the introduction of audio in August it is now possible to have twenty or so people conversing at once. This has an interesting implication for the conducting of remote meetings, meetups or just gatherings of like minded people. And so the tech sectors of business are now exploring Second Life as a central virtual meeting place as Duncan Riley points out.

It has been interesting to watch the effect that instant social networking sites (SNS) such as twitter are having on the uptake of Second Life. This is especially true with regard to TPN island in Second Life. People announce on twitter they are in Second Life at TPN island, and usually a group of people on twitter will follow them into Second Life, some for the first time.

Still too hard

Now it is this uptake of usually technical savvy newbies into Second Life that is of interest. It is the interface of Second Life with it’s complex menu structure, HUD controls and general lack of easy reference to the keyboard shortcuts; would be nice to have them in SL. that can make Second Life an hard tool to master even for a the technical savvy. Now if the tech-gurus of the common man are having problems in the first few sessions, how can it be expected that the average person can hope to cope in Second Life, as Amy Gahran explains.

People are used to the usual web based paradigm of the form, even the drop down menu navigation systems from desktop applications. But then you bring in an element of game play, which they may or may not be familiar with and you start to cross the boundaries. Social networking sites like Facebook have now started to move into the main stream, with everyday people outside of the early adopters getting onboard. Signing up is not hard, it’s just a form a on the web, interaction with Facebook again just forms and a few buttons in the traditional web based interface paradigm that we are used to.

In Second Life however; you sign up on at web site, okay that’s fine. Then you download software (road block one), then you install the software (maybe road block two). Next you login and create the avatar and go through orientation island (road block three). Then you are left to fend for yourself, get bored or just not see the point of it all (road block four). This is especially true if you login to Second Life when the western world in the northern hemisphere is asleep; it can be like a ghost town with just tumbleweeds. Now I have not even started on the confusing menu and the other interface aspects.

Consider you next door neighbor who is not computer savvy on Second Life. Then consider is Second Life ready for the masses, will it every be ready? Maybe it needs to just have a simple signup. The how about considering maybe it needs a mobile interface, A 3D-world SNS for the mobile phone as Daniel Terdiman suggests.

What do you think is Second Life ready for the big time or is it just an early adopter toy?

Technorati Tags: second+life, SL, TPN, The+Podcast+Network, social+networking, SNS

I’m getting too old for this, but I hope I can finish this one last project/design before I’m forced out.

This is often from an extremely experienced coder/designer over 40. It’s an old problem. It goes back to the 1970’s even. But still today it’s present even in the web industry. But why? Are we valuing the perceived spirit of creativity, youth and cheap labour over experience too much?

A while back I read (on dead tree material, sorry can’t remember the book) a quote from some of the old time programmers (circa 1970’s 1980’s) about the professional life expectancy of a programmer. The discussion was along the lines; that due to various management policies not valuing skills over salary cost the life expectancy of a programmer was expected to be about 10-12 years.

After graduating a Programmer will raise through the ranks to the position of Analysis Programmer after a few projects, then onto Senior Analysis, and finally at about 35 they are retired out of programming full time into the ranks of Project Manager or maybe if they are lucky and have talent they get to become a Business Analyst. If they are talent less they end up as a generalist IT Manager or are forced out of the industry altogether. The lucky ones become hired guns and go consulting, but even this has a limited life span in which you can have your fun. Sean McCown discusses this in detail and the implications, so I’m not going into it here.

I know this is old school, maybe I’m showing my age (damnit I’m not that old). But let’s consider this in an updated scenario.

Graduate Programmer after a while becomes a Senior Developer; they may become Project Lead, or Project Manager. Again by the time they are 35 years they are expect to be out of coding and starting down a management role where they can stagnant till they retire. It’s a little sad really. The business experience, the people liaison skills, and the general systems architecture skills are all lost or not valued.

That’s the coder done, what of the other side of the coin the designer. Well they are thrown away at a faster rate, on average a designer (I’m told) is swashed up at 25. And it’s very rare to find a designer working (besides freelance or as the boss) in a creative front line position beyond 30. Sure they get assigned as creative lead and later as CDs but they are considered really just directors (in the film sense) of the projects and not the talent that is on a ground doing it all. So for 3 years study we have effective hands on career of 4-9yrs that’s disgusting; it’s not a physical industry like the dance industry. Consider the great artists did their Masterpieces into middle age, what the hell we are doing, killing of the creative spirit just when it’s starting to flow.

I’m excluding small firms, consultants and micro business from this mix. As they often have complete different often non standard staffing requirements and are more to do with the personality of the directors than the any professional career path.

But let’s consider them in detail anyway. Are smaller web firms much different? Okay some are, some are not. A lot of web firms will favour younger staff over older ones as they basically are cheaper and work long hours and don’t have any of those annoying hang-ups like families / partners or any major social life, you know the social commitments. And if they do the pressure is usually on to commit to the firm 110% and basically live at the office. I’ll have some advice on this all “work no play” attitude in a later post.

The question is why we ship our staff off to the management retirement farm or out of the industry with burnout at 30-40. As I don’t fit this mold I have often wondered about this.

But the other day someone mentioned they gave up coding at 40 because they could no longer develop as fast as the young guns and they couldn’t keep the big picture of the overall code structure and modularity of how it all came together in their head anymore.

Then a friend from way back, who is a designer, tells me she is giving up after 10 years of brilliant work. She says she can’t get the drive, the muse, the emotion into her designs; she’s just burnt out. Even after an extended time away from the industry she’s drained and can’t come up with the “exciting new designs” within the tight time frames.

This made me think. Is this just an excuse? Or is it that they are under pressure to forgo family and trappings of settling down (like a mortgage), like their younger co-workers. Is it the extremely smaller timeframe we are putting the creatives under?

If it’s not the above employer pressure then is the statement true.

Do you suddenly turn 40 and you loose the ability to think logically and on a complex level, or find/discover that next design.

Coders say it get harder to have relearn a new syntax for the language / framework flavour of the year (note Ruby this year), but I think its gets easier. Then you tend from a design view to internally push yourself to create something radically new, which you know is not really possible, but then you do get technically quicker at the design process once you have the design picture in your head.

Maybe what happens is you start to loose focus on the detail and start to see the bigger picture as you start to apply the breath of your maturing knowledge base. Yeah right

But then again I know some gun coders/designers at 40-45, so maybe its just personality and lifestyle change that comes with family, 2.345 kids and social commitment. You mellow and you just don’t have that drive anymore. Does the late nights and focus on work alone of youth equate to creative drive?

If it is general social commitment that slows use down then what can we do about it? Besides the family friendly workplace (that’s another post too).

We all know the web industry has an extremely rapid cycle of knowledge turn over. This results in a massive self-education requirement every year. This has been rated from 40 to 100 hours a year (not much really only 2 hours a week), personally I would see it as more like 150 to 200 hours a year. Anyway the figure is high, higher than your accountant, your network engineer, your desktop programmer, it’s up there with doctors and lawyers.

As previously discussed the industry doesn’t in general seem to be able to keep up with the best practice standards than we are often touting. So if we can’t stay up to date, is the web industry breeding a group of people that are all destined to burn out or become redundant very quickly? Is the web industry become a product of our throw away society, but now we are throwing away developers and designers.

Do we need to foster and encourage our fellow designers and developers to get back that self-starter mentality that they had when they where young. And take up the burden of self-education again. Or do we just let them stagnate and slip into the roles that keep the admin johnnies of the world happy.

Should we all just shut up shop and stop coding / designing after we reach the age of 40 and go operate lawn mover rounds, as we are all past it and we are just kidding ourselves that we are not?

Remember that old not so hip guy at the end of the bar trying to be forever young, that will be you someday. Think about it.

Technorati Tags: career, education, ongoingeducation, webindustry, webdesign

With this employment selection process I was hoping to find people with skills equal if not surpassing my own. The usual old chestnut; web standards based compliant design and development with unobtrusive JavaScript and maybe a bit a programming scripting skills. I’ve always assume my skill set was average, and not that much on the bleeding edge. I have since learnt this is not the case.

What I didn’t think I would find is table based layouts, font tags, inline styles, and very obtrusive JavaScript. But I did, over and over again. “Okay”, you say “maybe you just got a batch of old designers, none of the graduates would have had coding standards like that?” Sorry you are wrong. The web standard demonstrated by the graduates was appalling. I had to pinch myself several times, as I was sure I was back in 1999.

What has happened? I know Molly has commented on this to death, that the educational institutions just can’t keep up with the demands of the web standards and the pace at which the leading edge of the web industry operates. But the levels of skills I encountered were at least 6 years behind the current best web industry practice.

I normally associate professionally and even to a degree socialise with like minded folk of a web standards ilk. So am I living in a rarefied atmosphere of a sugar coated web standards world? Am I sitting in the 10% of the Web Industry, and the rest of the non web standards crew is the 90%?

This leads me to question, does the client really care if their site is web standards compliant? Do they truly care if their web site is future proofed and has an increase level of accessibility? If it ranks on Google, they are happy, and that’s more to do with good SEO than anything. There are clients that are just not interested in accessibility or standards, if it looks okay in the major browsers and their audience can use the site, then they are happy.

With a business environment becoming slightly complacent towards standards. Where print based designers with no desire or experience in web standards design can churn out “pretty” cookie cutter web sites via using various automated software products. Or where non standards compliant web designers can throw together the web design in less time that a non tables based layout (mainly due to CSS tweaks). Or where software vendors still develop CMS that are not web standards based, using table layouts and font tags. Why should I buck the trend? Why should I continue to wave the web standards banner? It’s basically costing me business. And in the hard light of day, much how I would love to do my design work for nothing, I still have to feed a family and keep a roof over our heads.

I really question are Web Standards good for Web Business. A point in case is the recent factionisation of the various web standards groups into separate camps. This alone doesn’t give much hope for the future.

Should we take the easier conservative road and forget about web standards and best practice and just concentrate on what looks good for the client. Personally I like to be on the fringe.

Technorati Tags: webdesign, webstandards, education, business, webbusiness, professionalism