Live Blog @ Distill

[distill13-blog]

HOW TO WRITE BIG APPS

The Seneca pattern is a way to break your application into pieces so that you can put it back together again in many different ways. You don't have to worry about architecture, database choice, network design, scaling or even which objects to define - you can defer them all! Instead you focus on the "stuff that needs to happen" right from that start.

A concrete, production implementation exists in Node.js, and you can also write components in other languages.

BIO

Richard Rodger is the COO of nearform.com, a consultancy that helps startups build and launch software products. Richard is the author of Mobile Application Development in the Cloud (Wiley 2012), and was formerly CTO of feedhenry.com, a mobile applications platform. He is a regular contributor to the Sunday Business Post newspaper, and holds degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy, and Computer Science.

NOTES:

How do you build big apps?

   - Technical Debt. Take it on

   - if you don't take it on, you don't live long enough to have it matter

Patton

   "A good plan, violently executed now, is better..."

How do you reduce tech debt?

  - wrong question.  How do you give yourself more choice in reducing debt? is a better one

Better languages and better mental models helps

   - ruby fanboy

anecdote about roman numerals

   - they were able to do addition, subtraction, and even multiplication, but not division 

   - tech debt

roman numerals came from etruscan numbers coming from carving lines into wood to count goats

mental models for code

   - procedural, functional, object oriented, logic

   - goes through an example that proves that there wasn't consensus in the room about how to describe a car

   - claims OOP is a broken mental model because we can't possible describe every possible iteration of a car.  Claims design patterns are a workaround to brokenness

   - immediately dismisses procedural (spagghetti)

"we need a new mental model"

rails creates a shared mental model

humans are better at pattern matching than we are at logical deduction

plugs nearForm his company that builds MVPs for startups and intentionally does it hackily

here's the secret model:

1. Embrace micro services.  You can then swap out implementations later.  Must communicate with messages.

2. You can pattern match on messages. e.g if it contains message: tweet, twitter service knows to grab it.  tweet service can be implemented in any language

3.  Patterns map to actions.

   - cmd: drive vs. cmd:drive, type:hover.  How do you know

   - Two rules to make it work. 1. more specific always wins and 2. alphabetically

4.  Layers

    - If the pattern already exists, keep it around.  refer to it from the other one.

    - this is basically decorators

senecajs.org

Design for many languages

Design for scale (human + machine)

   - looks fractal in nature (wrap patterns in patterns that look similar)

Design for human brains

Q&A

What are the bigger implications of this paradigm?

   - doesn't know if it will ever scale to hundreds of machines, but if you get that far you're doing alright.

   - i concur with the not scaling part.

[distill13-blog]

Leaner meaner design techniques

[distill13-blog]

LEANER, MEANER DESIGN

After designing and building software for clients on more than 100 products over the last 20 years, it's become painfully obvious that there's no shortage of great ideas for new products. Equally obvious is that starting with a great idea doesn't necessarily mean you’ll wind up with a great product. Almost every wildly successful startup has found said success with a completely different product than they originally set out to build.

How have these teams found the secret successful product hiding in the heap of (mostly unused) features their team is furiously designing, building, shipping, and supporting? Sure, you're supposed to get out of the building and talk to customers, but how do you actually do it, and what do you once you have? And what if you got into this whole industry partly because you don't actually like talking to people?

In this issue:

• 1 question you should be asking everyone you meet

• 3 folds to a piece of paper that can turn anyone into a designer

• 8 hours that just might turn your product into the next big thing

• 100 dollars you should be spending on TaskRabbit every month

BIO

David Hendee is the Director of Design at Carbon Five, a 35-person web and mobile software design and development consultancy with offices in San Francisco and Santa Monica. In his 20 years as a software developer, David has been a designer and front-end developer for countless startups, non-profits and enterprise clients including Skype, National Geographic, and Genentech. Before Carbon Five, David was co-founder and VP of Design at the boutique software consultancy Fire Engine Red and a graduate of the Architecture program at Berkeley. He currently resides in Alameda, California with his wife and a tiny dinosaur named Dorothy.

NOTES:

3 developer-led things you can do to positively influence design.

Carbon Five when transitioning design in house hired great designers and also cross-trained developers in design

Take something that works.  Find the small version of it possible. Do it all the time.

Agile product development.

   - empathy interviews

   - six up sketches

   - three on thursdays

Empathy Interviews

   - walk a mile in somebody's shoe

   - 20 minutes should be sufficient

   - want to be doing it very frequently

   - half the time spent on demographics, half on psychographics

   - if you're an introvert, this may be hard

      - The FORD technique

         - family, occupation, recreation, dreams

   - Then switch to the problem space (not the solution)

     - When's the last time you ______? (blank is the problem you are trying to solve)

     - talk about the solution that they used

     - e.g  When is the last time you went to a museum/swiped a credit card/talked to someone remotely for more than 10 minutes?

  - Then How/Why Laddering

    - how -> practical response

    - why -> emotional

  - Whom should I talk to next?

  - Needs & insights?

  - Externalization

     - get really messy.

     - put all the data in the same place (on the wall)

Six-Up Sketches

   structured brainstorming. 

   six sketches in six minutes

   Creates group ownership of ideas

   How might we _____? (use technology to reduce fraud/extend our visitor experience/facilitate valuable conversations?)

   Show & tell.

   Dot voting (three votes per person)

   If no idea emerges, rerun the exercise again with a different set of people.

   Then Prototype

      - minimal prototype for real user testing

Three on Thursdays

Guerilla usability testing ( Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think)

Write a screener question to get the right sample users in the door.

    Do you work as a lawyer? Do you frequently walk around without cash?  Have you visited a sf museum in the last year?

Craigslist (can be shady) or TaskRabbit (pretty solid)

1 hour test every two hours (9 am, 11am, 1pm)

   - facilitator, testee, notetaker (from product team)

   - notetaker and facilitator switch roles.

   - record using silverback (but nobody ever watches it)

   - start with the empathy interview

   - One single use case

   - Show them something.

   - What do you think will happen next?

   - One idea per sticky note

   - hand them a t-shirt

   - Who should I talk to next?

   - attach the stickies to a screenshot of the product

   - only fix the three most broken things (dot method again)

      - gets to really awesome product faster

Next Steps

Try these - next hackathon talk to users.  next product meeting, try six up sketches.  

stickies.io

storymapper.io

Tinderbox (tinderbox.io) Carbon Five meetup

Q & A

Do you throw away the less important ideas that weren't the three most?

   - Pretty much yes (if they don't get addressed within the week)

How did you choose the three ideas of the 10?

   - empathy interviews are really important ( product market fit - connecting with customers) and you can do them at a party

There's value in continuing to do these processes throughout the product lifecycle even leading up to launch

   - still better to learn before launch than after (even if you know you don't want to hear it)

How do you translate from customer language to technical jargon?

  - let it be a mishmash of different terminologies.  

Testing for design is similar to testing for development but we should be test-driving design.

[distill13-blog]

FUNCTION AND DYSFUNCTION IN ENGINEERING-DRIVEN CULTURES

All companies and all teams have implicit beliefs, unspoken rules, unexamined norms, unsurfaced power structures. These form the basis of your culture and inform how you make technical and business decisions. In this talk, we'll explore a framework for understanding how culture really works in engineering-driven companies. We'll deconstruct what "engineering-driven" means; how power dynamics, mythologies and belief systems drive technology selection; how bias functions in team hiring and growth; and how culture moderates friction and function in other parts of the organization. You'll walk away with a better understanding of culture in engineering-driven organizations, and some ways to help build critical consciousness and healthier patterns in your team and company.

BIO

Shanley Kane is director of products and marketing at Heroku. Previously, she worked at Apigee on the developer tools product team. She is a community organizer, advocate of women in technology, and an alum of Carnegie Mellon University.

NOTES:

"we get past a thing to its meaning through a process of interrogation"

  - this is important because being an engineering culture does not mean that we are good at engineering

  - being technical does not mean that we make good technical decisions

  - not all technical decisions are/should be made for technical reasons

reward(s)

   - in fairytales characters are rewarded with status/riches/lands

   - in workplace, recognition, preferential treatment, promotions, praise, money

   - a lot of social capital for invention/creativity/new ideas/prototypes (feeds into nerd founder-myth)

   - refers back to the morning lecture that somewhat glamorized the volatile archetype

   - problem: focus problem/unshipped products/cool but not business success product

shipping better/faster  (is she saying that engineering-driven culture drives this?)

   - long term maintainability problems

   - incoherent products

   - ops challenges

spectrum is between shipping perfection (never) to shipping often (with issues)

if we glamorize the ship event do we feed back into heroism and therefore into creating situations where heroism is possible? negative feedback loop into dysfunction?

VALUES

    -in fairytales - chastity, beauty, social status

   - in tech: easy-to-use apis.  robust querying.  amazing clients?  (if you don't know what your technical values are, interrogate your motivation and thought processes in building software)

   may have problems like the following if using above

     - unable to profile operations burden, no evaluation of core technology, not testing for scale and ops

  openness/standards/portability

    - if it's too early you're optimizing prematurely

  blog posts about trivial implementations/listening to conference circuits/blogs

    - or are you following academic papers, real data from the field?

  or in the marketplace - hacker news/press/tweets?  

    - do you end up building for unsympathetic unpaying clients?

POWER     Influence, control, enforcement, management

   Centralized decision-making (top down)

      - can lead to low morale, lack of responsibility, uninformed choices

   Charisma/popularity

     - can lead to emotional decision making/loyalty/belonging?  (is loyalty bad?)

   Blame/fear/punishing dissent

      - people don't take risk, don't report problems, endemic dishonesty

   Pressure/timelines/roadmaps

     -  low quality/burn out

  by understanding these as power, we can better understand how to modify behavior

HOMOGENEITY

if you end up with homogenous white male nerd team

   - sexism, brogramming (what is brogramming?)

homogeneity in expertise leads to to homogeneity in decision making

  -like front end vs. back end

  - like client vs. server

  - sql vs. nosql

  - data/languages/etc...

people tend to do what they're good at

HISTORY

historical patterns and context

residual damage and trauma that results from

   - outages/layoffs/failed projects

   - are they making people afraid to try new things

   - interpersonal issues

past successes

   - can be motivating, but evaluate whether they continue to be relevant as you go forward

There are the above 5 axes that help us understand how decision-making is driven.

Can be difficult/painful/emotional to talk openly about these ideas.

How to converse:

DUALITY

man had one eye laughing and one weeping eye

   - one eye weeped because he had seen great loss but the other was laughing because he had a family and could walk his kids play (or something)

Similar to duality we have to take while analyzing our cultures

   - important that we get fulfillment and joy from our teams

   - also have to be able to critique ourselves and our teams.  imagine worst case scenarios

Build a culture where people can accept the duality

   - we are people and we are broken. we can always improve.  everything is broken

  - how broken is up to you?

Q&A

as a manager building a team from scratch, what advice would you give them:

   - look at management as more of facilitation, not as central point of decision making

you talk about not building homogeneity, how do you create a heterogeneous team that works well together as well as just looks good together.

  - diversity implicitly helps.

  - if you always hang out with white straight men, actively seek out contact with communities and cultures that you don't seek out on a daily basis

[distill13-blog]

DEATH TO COOKIES

You might be used to being laughed at for your hatred of cookies, but fear not, this talk will give you all the arguments you need for defeating your opponents when they once more start claiming that cookies are the greatest invention since animated gifs.

In this session we will be reminded why the cookies are our death sworn nemesis and get every cookie sympathizer back in line. We will see how there is no escaping from the threat that is a free roaming cookie and explore the utopia of a cookie free society.

To do this, we pretend to be one of the misguided cookie lovers and try to protect our website against increasingly more complex attacks, without giving up on using cookies. Until we inevitable reach the point were it's simply no longer possible to offer a fully secure application.

BIO

As maintainer of Sinatra, Konstantin is an Open Source developer by heart. Ruby has become his language of choice since 2005. He regularly contributes to different widespread projects, like Rubinius, Rack, Travis, Rails, and many more.

In 2012, Konstantin received the Ruby Hero Award for his outstanding contributions to the community.

He now works on Open Source projects at Travis CI in Berlin, Germany.

NOTES:

If there's one thing you take away: Using cookies as an authentication solution is a "half-baked" solution. 

never server JSON that has an array at the top level

CRIME attack tacks words onto url to see how they impact compression level and can discern which words/characters are in the cookie

BREACH attack targets the CSRF token, not the cookie (like CRIME but for the compression ratio  of the response)

Travis uses custom headers combined with local storage.

Ultimately proposes that we need new browser concepts.  

[distill13-blog]

KEYNOTE SESSION - Michael Lopp

Michael Lopp is a director at Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley software company dedicated to radicalizing the way the world interacts with data. Before joining Palantir, Lopp was part of the senior leadership team at Apple for nine years where he led essential parts of the Mac OS X engineering team, and subsequently managed the engineering team responsible for Apple’s Online Store. Prior to Apple, he worked in engineering leadership at notable Silicon Valley companies such as Netscape, Symantecand Borland. Lopp is a noted author in Silicon Valley; his blog, “Rands In Repose,” and his books, Managing Humans and Being Geek, are part of a new management and engineering canon.

  NOTES:

Shows picture of 20 different types of power plugs around the world and a map talking about how this is a mess

Then shows the 30 pin apple plug asks for a show of hands and talks about the change to the new cable

Stables and Volatiles

Wrote Managing Humans and Being Geek

"You're in a hurry"

   - we get bored.

   - we are three years away from a new job/position

   - once you learn everything and optimize

"Your gig has an expiration date"

   - if you can't see to the next new part of your role, then it's time to move

"1.0 is going to kill you"

   - endless trivial bullshit and decisions that have to be made

"Disruption"

   - now a marketing term

   - has been happening in the valley for a long time - went from farms and vineyards to 3 million super high nerd density in 50 years

william shockley

   - invented the transistor (nobel prize winner)

   - brought people together in a garage in palo alto

   - was a terrible human being and a racist

   - traiterous 8 (founded fairchild semiconductor and intel)

These guys defined the egalitarian workplace

   - no dress code

   - flat no titles

   - stock options for employees

   - "they're the reason you're here wearing flip flops"

"push decision making decisions out to the edges"

engineers as a demographic are risk takers

   - we know failure is an excellent way to learn

Archetypes and Spectrum

     Stephen story - comes in says there's no way to accomplish something

       - brought people together and jumpstarted the org and accomplished something in 3 weeks, but there was lots of duct tape and then it eventually came crumbling down

       - Stephen is a volatile

   Stables

       - like schedules.   like stability

       - play nice with others

       - value no drama teams and effeciency

       - calmly assess risk

       - generate a lot of process because it generates predictability

       - salience in decision making.  tendency to pick the middle of the road given the input data

Volatiles

     - prefer to define strategy than follow it

     - want to believe that they control their destiny

     - cannot conceive of failing and find a thrill in risk

     - don't build predictable or stable things but build a lot

     - only reliable if it's in their best interest

         - management of volatiles requires putting things into their context

     -  prefer to work in small autonomous teams

     - don't care how you feel

          - is that person's feelings more important than these other 26 things?

          - have to clean up the wake of unhappy people they leave behind

     - will choose the flying toaster when given the options of toasters

Guys who made the flying toaster screen saver eventually created moveon.org

Allergic Reactions

    - These guys and gals hate each other ( Larry disagrees)

   - volatiles believes stables are slow, lazy, and political bureaucrats.

   - stables believe volatiles will do whatever they want.

   - "Everyone's right. Sigh"

   - You need to build a place where they BOTH THRIVE.

The reward for shipping 1.0 can be a curse.

   - Borland (phillipe kahn - volatile  - eventually invented the camera phone)

   - Netscape ( Marc andressen - volatile)

   - Apple ( Steve Jobs)

   - Volatiles can become stables

        - volatiles want to protect the thing that was so hard to build (1.0)

        - this can be dangerous

        - company stops being innovative

Oracle/IBM/HP = yard sale of mediocrity

   - they're coasting and making money, but they're not willing to take big risks

Borland fell apart

Netscape bought by AOL ("fate worse than death")

Apple

   - barely survived in 97 but still kicking

DO YOU WANT FLYING TOASTERS?

Back to the 30pin vs. the new cable

Why did we go "WHAT?" when we saw the cable.

Is apple a bunch of greedy bastards?

Steve Jobs was willing to kill the ipod mini when demand still outweighed supply and was the #1 consumer electronics product

MBP removed replaceable battery

   - gave away the battery business so they could learn about lion polymer battery and move forward

apple does not want to become stable

you need both.

stables bring credibility and predictability to your execution.

volatiles

   - someone who knows nothing lasts and considers it their mission in life to replace that which is inefficient, boring, and uninspired.

build a world where they can both thrive

   - build appreciation of the other side of the fence

   - throw away things tyou cherish

  - distribute blank slates (at palantir gives small teams 3 months to do whatever they want)

   - equal representation of - and investment in sboth groups

  - stagnation == death

back to the power plugs

   - it's the result of uncoordinated decision making (not enough volatile)

Q&A:

how does a volatile "kick a stable in the ass" in an academic setting?

   - Lopp says university is broken, and it's BS

   - doesn't see it as a place that cultivates creativity

reiterates that volatiles and stables are equally important and should be rewarded comparably.

[distill13-blog]

ANTI-SPAM & ANTI-GAMING TACTICS

Drawing on experiences of running large websites (such as digg.com) and blogs, this session will discuss numerous tactics that you can use to keep spammers and website gamers at bay. Some specific technologies and how to interface with them will be mentioned, but also generic discussions of base theory, that you can use to apply to your own website where you see fit.

BIO

Eli has been building Web Applications for over 18 years and has worked on numerous high profile projects, such as Digg, TripAdvisor, and the Hubble Space Telescope Program. He is currently a Founding Partner & CTO of Musketeers.me, and the Managing Editor of php|architect magazine. He is also an avid writer (blogs, articles and books), and has spoken at numerous conferences.

NOTES:

Anti-spam

Create hurdles

  - moderate(requires lots of employee time but works very well)

  - require login (stops most basic issues and has benefits later on)

Prove that the poster is human

   - CSRF Protection

         extra steps for scripts

   - CAPTCHA - very effective but intrusive

   - Require user agent

        - i don't think this works anymore

   - CSS hidden field

        - Larry likes 

        - form that should be empty that only a bot would populate

    Require Javascript

        - use javascript to generate the form so only a browser that executes js will be able to see the form.

        - or only have divs and make the divs handle onclick events

        - or have javascript generate a math problem and its answer (or any element in the form) and only accept the submission if that field is present

IP - Based Methods

Public blacklists

Your own blacklist

   - bans should be temporary

Perishable press blacklist

   - apache htaccess file that scans headers, parts of ips, and known bad user agents and known scripts.  

   - very few false positives

Scan for Junk

Akismet, spamassassin, antispambee, mollom,

Make SPAM less advantageous to spammers

rel="nofollow" on all UGC links.  This means google page rank not improved for both good and bad UGC.

Disallow links completely

    ANTI- GAMING

Prove they are Human

Captcha/csrf/user agent

   - same tricks as anti-spam for the same reason

Rate limiting 

   - kept the data in the php session (times of last 5 clicks. measure distance between the first click and the last click in time)

Check the source

User

    lots of activity on a single account.  lots of users with little history

IP

   - lots of activity from a single IP

Refer

   - lots of activity from non-destination pages from a single refer or not containing referrer

Pattern Matching

Friendships?

  -use both internal and external user graph data to determine realism of actions

Order of actions

   are actions always happening in the same exact order? BOT.

Timing of actions

   Happening too fast.  Happening in very regular intervals.

Leave Traps

Leave cookies to catch people generating multiple accounts

    - don't clear this other cookie on log out

How do you handle offenders?

You can make it look like it worked.

You can blatantly deny actions

Is it silently deleted?

Karma concept

Beware of malleable content!

   - people will change it afterwards

  Very useful lecture says Larry

[distill13-blog]

Afternoon KEYNOTE SESSION

James Whelton hails from Cork, Ireland. A 20 year old developer and social entrepreneur, he is passionate about using technology to improve the world and making the opportunity to experience the awesomeness of coding available to young people around the world. With a background in iOS and Web development, he’s ventured in everything from building Twitter powered doors to proximity controlled kettles to realtime services to teaching 11 years olds Objective-C. He was named a Forbes 30 under 30 in 2013 for social entrepreneurship and Irish Software Association Person of the Year 2012. He likes hacking the system, using code to achieve big things, pina coladas and getting caught in the rain.

  NOTES

Creating a movement.

Movements are how we change the status quo

Can be used by:

   People wanting to build a user base

   People wanting to improve society

   People wanting to challenge the status quo

   People wanting to spread new ideas

What they can do:

   Change the status quo

   Bring attention to something

   Gather followers rapidly

    Develop faster by virtue of more people involved

 Lifecycle:

   someone does something new -> early adopters -> group mentality and momentum builds -> non-adopters are odd ones out -> movement vision becomes the norm -> back to step 1

How do you start one?

   Vision: Where you're going

       Achievable, relatable, realistic

   Story: where you've been

       Evoke an emotional response

   Actions: how you get there

     easy to follow, appropriate entry level, sharable, recognizable, easy to join the group

kony2012 is a good example of a great story and vision but not the right actions. didn't ultimately achieve the goal of capturing kony and top commanders even though they had 100m views and millions of tweets etc.

tune the actions:    improve accessibility

hack the model

   remove bottlenecks

   engineer for more impact  (e.g. to reach a certain level of achievement, you have to give back to the community)

Generate an identity

   gives participants a sense of belonging

Empower

   give authority 

   elect, create groups

Don't get distracted by vanity metrics

   can be difficult to quantify

   Figure out your one measurable impact metric

If there's something you wish you had or had had growing up, mobilize yourself and make a dent.

[distill13-blog]

Open Sourcing Mental Illness by Ed Finkler

OPEN SOURCING MENTAL ILLNESS

In the spirit of open source, I’d like to shine a spotlight on depression. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s important. Mental illness affects many of us, but the stigma attached to it dissuades most people from talking about it openly. That’s not how we make progress. With this talk, I want to do my part.

I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety when I was thirteen, and I’ve been struggling with it my whole life. In this talk, I’ll discuss how it has impacted my work as a developer, husband, and father.

By speaking openly about my own challenges and successes, I hope those struggling with mental illness will learn how to be happier and more productive, and others can better understand how to be helpful and supportive.

BIO

With over 15 years of passionate web development experience and open source advocacy, Ed Finkler loves empowering people through technology. He’s excited about creating things and sharing them with the world.

He served as web lead and security researcher at The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University for 9 years. More recently, he has been helping startup teams build exciting e-commerce, social sharing, and mapping systems. He’s a proud member of the Fictive Kin team, working on Done Not Done, Gimme Bar, and lots of other cool stuff. Along with Chris Hartjes, Ed is co-host of the Development Hell podcast.

Ed spends much of his free time creating and working on open source projects such as Spaz, a long-running, award winning microblogging client. Ed also created the PHP libraries like FUnit, Resty.php, PHPSecInfo, and Inspekt.

NOTES:

Ed has generalized anxiety disorder

   - gets stressed out about things in a way that is crippling and affects his ability to interact with things

   - depression is a part of this

   - Adult ADD

Intensity of emotion

   loss of temper, screaming at people, feeling intensity, takes a lot of strength to not act on it

Anxiety

   it's not like your anxiety about a job interview or mondays.

   it's your brain feeding stress response stuff to your body and there's not much you can do about it but it's disabling

   feels like a rope pulling out the bottom of the sternum

   can have physiological impacts (IBS) - body isn't used to those chemicals

Problems focusing

Spiraling chains of thoughts

    can jump to the worst conclusions of one thought after the other 

    can construct outcomes very rapidly

    Internalizing that feeds into it, talking about it helps

Obsessing on negative events

   still thinks back about negative events that occurred 30 years ago that had no material impact on his life and obsesses on the guilt or negative emotion

Unwanted thoughts

   Maria Banford comedy set http://www.comedycentral.com/comedians/maria-bamford

Negative Major Impacts:

   Feeling alone/unlike anyone else

   Feeling broken and don't know how to fix it

   Suicidal thoughts and self-mutilation

Anxiety + Depression raise your mortality rate

   Emotional isolation is comparable to smoking in affect on life expectancy

Ideas to help:

Working with teams who are understanding and sympathetic to the situation

Helping friends & coworkers:

   help them feel safe

   Listen to them, try to understand

   Acknowledge their frustration

   help them anticipate changes. Help them plan.  Ask them what they need to facilitate the change for them. 

   Encourage & enable them to seek help. 

If you want to help:

   - talk and share

funakatron.com/osmi

END THE STIGMA. 

Q&A

adderall vs. strattera

   - like speed vs. not speed

   - cut appetite and gave energy

   - after a few weeks left with anxiety but would never advocate for one drug over another

Things that you would change if you could do childhood again?

   - Somebody to talk to: tell a child with similar mental illness that "there's nothing wrong with you"

   - bullied a lot in jr. high and feels that it's a severe trauma

   - typically you have to go through 3 or 4 seriously stressful events to convert from someone with a propensity for depression to actually be affected

Birds of a Feather meet ups 

   - a place for people to talk about what they are going through

devpressed.com

funkatron.com

[distill13-blog]

Realigning & Refactoring UI Best Practices

REALIGNING & REFACTORING UI

Often designers and developers see Markup and CSS Refactoring as a dreaded, monolithic task. Organization, architecture, clean up, optimization, documentation all seem tedious and overwhelming. However, if you're armed with the right tools and a solid foundation, you may find refactoring to be actually quite fun. Learn some Sass, markup, and documentation tips & tricks from a product designer's perspective. Start making refactoring a regular part of your design process and development workflows.

BIO

Jina Bolton enjoys creating beautiful user experiences. She currently works as a product designer at Do, an awesome company that helps you get work done. Previously, Jina has worked at rad companies including Apple, Engine Yard, and Crush + Lovely. She also coauthored 2 books, Fancy Form Design and The Art & Science of CSS.

She is currently helping lead Team Sass Design (a task force redesigning the Sass website) and Susy Next, the upcoming version of the Susy Responsive Grid system for Compass. She also has a side project, Art in My Coffee, a curated gallery of coffee art.

NOTES

Think about the entire lifecycle, as a set of systems, not a set of pages.

Build a styleguide in the same codebase and use it as a test for your CSS changes

   - There are styleguide generators (try styledocco)

fractured process -> fractured UX

Use SASS

Book recommendation Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

Don't nest more than 3 levels in your SASS

SUSY is good for grid layouts

Compass for SASS and mixins

Try bordoer-box sizing at a top level

Use normalize (not old-school reset)

Keep different kinds of components organized in different sass modules (like buttons/forms/etc)

Make your SASS file a template and inject debug styles in debug mode

Make a UI library

   -Start with styles, eventually include DOM and more

Color files with color variables for color pallet

SASSME is a good tool for sass + colors

Check out Starbucks styleguide

Use iframes to test responsive design

@jina 

[distill13-blog]

Keynote 5

Creativity/Brainstorming (continued)

   Out of the box/true innovation has a population of 1 (misquote it was better when he said that)

   thinks that everything iphone/ipad came out of ipod, which was a product that entered a very crowded mp3 player market but just had a strong focus on ease of use

Competition

   If you're competing, don't just compete on product. Compete with the other leaders.  "Compete with the other CEO. Get into his brain"

    Did demos with competitors with very sophisticated holograms and convinced them to waste time on that.  Distracted from real product velocity.

Anarchy

   Black permanent marker graffiti in the office.  Drives motivation.

[distill13-blog]

[distill13-blog]

Keynote 4

Brainstorming

   first room - be the dreamer. as ridiculous as you can be, outlandish

   second room - be the realist - how could you actually accomplish the things in real terms.

   third room - the critic - shoot down the bad ones

   read john cleese's lecture on brainstorming/creativity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9rtmxJrKwc

[distill13-blog]

Keynote 3

Stimulating Environment

   Tools, things to play with

   Dungeon - safe place

   passive is the enemy - active is the goal

    project-based

   learn while striving to achieve a goal. don't just pick a skill and approach it academically.

Mentorship

   people (kids) respond better to mentorship when it's "tight" and more focused.

entrepreneurship

   never allow yourself to be in a position where youy don't have enough cash flow to start something new

   stories about how to sell candy bars.   

[distill13-blog]

Keynote 2

Random input - crash random conferences in vegas

Leave your comfort zone

   create an environment for brain enrichment and creativity

   Nolan was pushing kids at a young age

Dice game?

    Habits kill your brain.  Doing the same thing every day isn't living life, it's living a duplicate.

   LIst of things (half you want to do, half you don't want to do), roll the dice and do a bunch of things that the dice tell you to do.  Finding the Next Steve Jobs  by Nolan B coming soon

Pick up random-ass hobbies

   Brent went to clown school

   Gets really awkward when he tries to describe picking up graffiti "i was the only white guy with uh uh uh.... a bunch of guys from the hood"

[distill13-blog]

Keynote 1

Nolan talking about his current endeavor: brainrush

"Figure out what's going on in school today and then do the opposite"

"getting you into a state of flow"

Brent:

"Working on reinventing the carnival"

"Will be going on the road" "in SF in about a year"

Moving on to the focus of the talk: Creativity

[distill13-blog]

Keynote

KEYNOTE SESSION

Nolan Bushnell is best known as the founder of Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater. Mr. Bushnell is passionate about enhancing and improving the educational process by integrating the latest in brain science, and truly enjoys motivating and inspiring others with his views on entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and education. Currently, Mr. Bushnell is devoting his talents to fixing education with his new company, Brainrush. His beta software is teaching academic subjects at over 10 times the speed in classrooms with over 90% retention. He uses video game metrics to addict learners to academic subjects. Over the years, Bushnell has garnered many accolades and distinctions. He was named ASI 1997 Man of the Year, inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame, inducted into the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame and named one of Newsweek’s “50 Men That Changed America.” He is also highlighted as one of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial icons in “The Revolutionaries” display at the renowned Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.