Following on from Barcamp a few weeks ago, I have finally gotten around to tidying up my slides, so here they are in all their glory..

• High Performance RIA’s (3.5mb PDF)

As the title suggests, I presented on various performance tips for developing Rich Internet Applications, which I have blogged about here previously. The session itself seemed to go quite well, with some good audience participation and feedback - I would definitely recommend the whole barcamp experience, it was a fantastic weekend.

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This week I discovered a fantastic Firefox plug-in called MeeTimer by Andy Mitchell, which actually helps me be more productive. Well.. I say this week, I have actually had it installed for a while, but have just found the motivation to configure and use it.

How it works is simple, it tracks the amount of time that you spend on individual websites, and allows you to group them by category. So, the company intranet may be classed as work, whereas hours whittled away on Facebook fall under the category of procrastination. All of this data is captured, and is available for your scrutiny. I’m also told that the next version will have lots of new features for slicing and dicing this data - including a quick slick Flex-based dashboard for visually exploring your data.

In addition to simple tracking, MeeTimer takes a pro-active role in making you productive, blacking out pages and adding pop-up’s to links - “Warning! You have already spent 4.4% of your working week poking your friend’s on Facebook, perhaps you should be working?”.

Its really quite cool, and its active deterrents really set it apart from other pieces of software which attempt to track the time spent in-front of the web browser.

For me I think that was the key to its usefulness, as it is far too easy to get carried away either on the likes of Facebook or even on geeky sites such as Ajaxian, which I often visit to keep up with the latest goings on in the JavaScript world. This is definitely a plug in which I will be keeping installed as I attempt to organize my life!

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As I write this post, I am feeling totally knackered after having just finished with dConstruct and Barcamp Brighton. What can I say? It has been a fantastic five days, starting with Leisa Reichelt’s Collaboration, Creativity and Concensus workshop on Wednesday and ending with powerpoint karaoke on Sunday evening.

This year’s conference continued the excellence of the year before, and done an excellent job at reinventing itself - focussing this time around on user experience, rather than just simply the world of Web 2.0 and API’s. Another fantastic chance to network and meet other people in the industry, and of course, another opportunity to demonstrate how much I hate my liver at the pre and after parties. (Fortunately, this time around I did not end up paddling around on the sea during the wee hours of the morning!).

Barcamp swiftly followed. Being a Barcamp virgin, I was not really sure what to expect, but ended up enjoying the experience - stay tuned for my presentation slides as soon as I have tidied them up a bit. It was great to chat to interesting people and learn about diverse topics - from Scuba Diving to Mac OS X server.

So, a good time all around.I could go on and write about each presentation and session in detail, but too be honest I don’t see the value in that - most speaker slides are available elsewhere online, and many other people have already blogged about them. Instead, I’m going to talk about what the experience meant to me, what I got out of it and where I am going to take it.

What do I do?

As a web designer/developer and general geek, I’ve often had a lot of ambiguity in my job title - it certainly doesn’t describe what I do in any adequate way, and often I end up almost muddling about doing bits and pieces of everything, not totally sure what I do, or where I want to go.
Organization size plays a part in this, and this ambiguity is definitely more common larger organizations, where there are generally a handful of generic roles which mainly exist for Human Resource purposes. In addition, definitely in organizations where web is not the core competency, you tend to end up with teams disproportional to the overall company size or customer base, who end up almost ‘muddling’ their way through and doing bits and pieces of everything.
In smaller organizations, roles are often much more well defined, however also maintaining the multi-disciplined balance. You have Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers and so on, but you find that many team members have a much broader range of skills.
For me, I want to reduce this ambiguity, and really want to focus more on interaction and experience design; rather than ‘muddling’ and fighting fires. How I am going to do this yet, I’m not sure, but I certainly want to narrow my focus a bit (whilst still continuing much of the casual geeking!).

How do I do it?

Process has been a major focus of my attention over the past year - looking at ways we can improve communication, collaboration and partnership; how we can change our core processes in order to be more iterative, agile, adaptable and delivering better quality at reduced cost and with a quicker time to market. Looking back on it all, I’m quite surprised that I haven’t either pulled all my hair out in despair or ran away screaming yet!

During one of the Barcamp sessions, the Clearleft guys provided a fascinating insight into how they work and their internal development processes. In addition, Leisa’s brainstorming and collaboration techniques were inspiring. For me, its so eye opening to see how other organizations who perform so well in the industry actually go about things. In other ways, its a bit depressing to see how much better they do things compared to how my company works, but its always good to have a challenge!

Andy Budd brought up an excellent point, which is the importance of engaging with your client on a business level. So rather than talking in design or development terms, you should be talking about the core business needs and how they are met in a particular design. This is something which I totally agree with, and have had great success with, and is one of the more important things you need to remember when dealing with clients - the fundamental why you are doing something the way that you are. If you begin talking in specific design jargon, then you lose the common language which you can use with your business partners, and things get diluted. Client facing developers and designers need to be able to understand the business domain in order to develop the most effective solutions.

One of the things I will be thinking around is this whole process aspect - especially with regard to how they can be applied within a larger organization, with global teams and often less specialized expertise when it comes to the web. Where I can, I will also be blogging about this about particular experiences and tips.

On a personal level, I also want to spend more time actually thinking about the audience for whom I am designing and developing for - developing persona’s, brainstorming, collaboratively working with clients and just spending more time in general on the ‘discovery’ phase of a particular project.

Ryan Carson also had some interesting things to say on how it is completely possible, and often a good idea, to compress five days into four - leaving you with a four day working week. Thats quite interesting, though I can’t help feeling that due to the global nature of what I do, it would never work. However, it has got me thinking about how I can work more effectively and manage my time so that I actually have more time for exploring my own interests, discovering new technologies and skills, and also doing everything else I have set out to do!

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