I don’t often write about places where I work, but this is a happy exception. Yahoo have massively extended the already pretty terrifyingly impressive Yahoo! Developer Network with a whole foray into design patterns and client-side technologies. So first you’ve got the Design Pattern Library, with information about mostly pretty reasonable techniques for handling ratings and reviews, navigation, breadcrumbs and the like. Then you’ve got the User Interface Library full of useful JavaScript components for drag-and-drop, sliders and tree views, the Graded Browser Support Guidelines and the Yahoo! User Interface blog which will feature, “News and Articles about Designing and Developing with Yahoo! Libraries”. Where appropriate it’s all been released under pretty reasonable (some might say excessively reasonable) licenses. I’d really recommend that people check this stuff out – YDN are one of the parts of Yahoo that regularly get me excited.
Right then. My slides. I’ve been trying to work out the best way to put these up in public and it’s been more confusing than I thought it would be. Basically, the slides are so Keynote-dependent and full of transitions and weird fonts that it would translate very badly to Powerpoint – and with no one having the fonts, the presentation would look pretty terrible anyway. So I’ve decided to put it out there in two forms – both simple exports of a slightly adapted version. If you want the PDF it’s here: Native to a Web of Data (16Mb). If you’d rather view it online directly, then I’ve used the export-to-HTML feature (which I’m beginning to suspect might kind of suck a bit) to produce the likely-to-crash-your-browser-with-its-hugeness Native to a Web of Data.
The biggest question I’ve been asking myself is whether or not it’ll make any sense as a standalone presentation, and i’m afraid to say that the answer is sort of. Without my notes there are great chunks where I’m afraid you’ll have to make pretty substantial leaps to keep the thread of the thing, which is hardly ideal. What I should really be doing is writing the thing up in a more logical thorough and coherent way, but I’m not sure I’ve got the mental agility to do that at the moment. So enjoy it in as much as you are able and I’ll think about writing it up over the next few weeks.
As usual I have to preface all of this stuff with the normal disclaimers. The views presented in this presentation do not necessarily represent the views of my employers.
I’m so out of practice in writing this thing that I hardly know where to start. The distractions of a new job and conference deadlines and life-organising rubbish have left my weblog lonely and forlorn. And – as usual – the longer you leave these things, the harder they become. Over the last few years I’ve really noticed that my ability to write comes and goes in cycles. Normally the way you break the low cycles is to talk about any old crap. You just get it out there and then the flow comes back. Which makes me think that maybe it’s a weird form of performance anxiety.
So I’ve decided to break this particular cycle of crapulence by talking about my latest London food discovery – Koba on Rathbone Street just north of Oxford Street. I went there a few weeks ago with Jones and Webb and assorted other fun hipster nerds, and liked it so much that I dragged Simon along the other night after work. I’ve only been to one Korean barbeque place before in London, and frankly it kind of sucked. But this one had all the thrill of having food cooked at your table, with some really extraordinary tastes and weird new sensations. Bloody lovely it was. Very much recommended.
We had a really weird starter this time – a mass of raw beef and raw pear joined up with raw eggs yolk, mixed together at the table. I’m not going to pretend that it was a totally joyful experience, but it was fascinating and I suspect I could get used to it. The meat was chilled to the point of having tiny ice crystals in it, and crunched with almost the same consistency as the tiny slivers of pear. Very strange. In the picture it looks a bit like it’s frying on some kind of warm skillet. But it’s not – it’s just a tasty mash of uncooked beef on a plate. I’m not sure eating totally uncooked beef or raw egg yolks is really enormously good for you, but there you go.
Everything else was enormously well cooked in front of our eyes – with an orgy of little sensory pleasures collapsing all over the place. Each type of meat was cooked slightly differently and deposited on our plates to be wrapped up in leaves with a little hot sauce and a mixture of spring onions. Rounds of bacon sizzled in soy sauce, spicy chicken bits cooked in moments, and tiny thin bits of beef were so delicately cooked that they practically evaporated in your mouth. And then there was the little octopi/octopodes that actually wiggled and twisted as they were cooked. Probably a bit weird for some of you, but it tasted pretty good.
So then a recommendation! Go to Koba. Stuff your face and let them guide you through the whole experience. It’s enormously good fun and – although I’ll probably get some unpleasant bowel disorder as a result – really really tasty. Check out Simon’s Flickr Photoset for more details.
And in the meantime, I’ve broken the block, written some old piece of rubbish to keep my hand in and now I’m going to go off and try and write something more useful instead…
Wow. Yesterday’s Future of Web Apps summit was completely intense. I’d been worrying about talking for about a month, and puzzling away at what I wanted to say for even longer, which is pretty much why my site has been so quiet lately. But in the end it all came off – I got a lot of nice comments from people, and I’m pretty happy with its substance. I was so full of adrenalin by the end of the day that I was on a high for hours, and today I’ve experienced a weird kind of exhausted come-down. But it was worth it. I had a really good day.
The idea for the talk I gave (“Native to a Web of Data”) originated in conversations with Rael Dornfest after our work on the BBC PIPs project. He wanted me to write some kind of ‘User Interface Guidelines for Web 2.0″ talk for the Web 2.0 conference to focus on identifiers, addressability, ajax and the like – all the stuff that had come up in conversations and work that Matt Biddulph, Margaret Hanley, Gavin Bell and I had done together. But then I’d got stuck thinking around the area and couldn’t find an angle to attack it from, and I’d left it on the backburner. It was months later that Ryan asked if I’d like to talk at the summit, and I decided to take another stab at it, and I think it came out pretty well. I got a lot of positive comments from people at the event saying that it had crystallised a lot of the stuff that they’d already known but had trouble articulating. In retrospect, I think maybe all I did was write something that should give clued-up developers the argumentative support to convince people to let them do their jobs properly. But I’m pretty much happy with that.
The rest of the day was pretty awesome – the venue was extraordinary, and I really enjoyed seeing Cal and Joshua, and hearing what they were up to. I was also really really impressed by Ryan Carson’s piece on the financial sides of doing a small start-up. That pretty much rocked, and had really lovely typography. David Heinemeier Hanson’s piece on Ruby on Rails seemed pretty impressive too, and many people I rate are really keen on it as a framework (again Matt Biddulph). So that was good.
Even better for me was bumping into all kinds of neat people from around the industry who I don’t get to see enough of – people like Jamie Tetlow, Duncan Ponting, Matt Patterson, Paul Hammond, Becky Ford and all the BBC crew from R&Mi, Rod McLaren, Meg Pickard, some of the London Yahoos who I’ve got to know a bit and – a particular surprise – Ms. Jen who I haven’t seen since she generously offered to give me a lift from Los Angeles to San Francisco a few years ago. She’s in town at the moment, so everyone say hi. There were about a billion other cool people around, and all I can say is, don’t be a strange, chuck me an e-mail!
Anyay, I’m probably going to be putting up the slides on my site in the next day or so, but at the moment they’re all Keynote only and they look a bit rubbish in Powerpoint and stuff, so I should probably neaten them up a bit. In the meantime, I should probably again thank Simon Willison, Biddulph and Andy for their help along the way. I hope everyone’s well – and thanks again everyone for the kind words.