Month: March 2011

The South by Southwest (SxSW) conference may have started off as a music festival – and it still is; if you want to see up-and-coming bands before anyone else hears about them, this is the place – but it’s grown to include the film and interactive sections. I’ve been told that nowadays, the Interactive part of the conference is larger than Music and Film.

It was at SxSW that Twitter and later, Foursquare, exploded onto the scene, when A-list bloggers started making use of it to find each other and locate the happening parties. I’ve seen some of the best and most inspiring presentations at SxSW, from Kathy Sierra talking about creating apps so great that your users become passionate about them to the creator of the Post Secret talking about building a site that tugs at your heartstrings to Ben Huh explaining how I Can Haz Cheezburger got started, and handing out cheeseburgers to everyone in the audience at the end of the session. I watched the entertaining but cringeworthy keynote with Sarah Lacy interviewing Mark Zuckerburg during which they weren’t clicking. I’ve had amazing between-sessions conversations with developers, designers and “suits” about their projects, technologies that they were excited about and the industry in general. And yes, I may have attended a party of two.

While there’s a lot that you can learn online, there’s a reason the expression “you had to be there” exists. For all the world-shrinking tech that lets us send words, sounds, pictures and videos over great distances and lets us attend meetings just with a headset and webcam, there’s still no substitute for gathering together to tell stories, share ideas and even team up. That’s why we go to great expense to hold events like TechDays and AlignIT as well as smaller gatherings like hackathons and Coffee and Codes. As the “agilistas” will tell you, developing software is as much about talking to people as it is about talking to machines.

That’s one of the reasons I’m at South by Southwest for the next seven days. I’m there to catch up with some of the brightest lights in the world of interactive tech, hear what they have to say, pick their brains and share this knowledge with you. I’ll be filing reports from the conference, taking notes, pictures and video, so you can see what’s going on.

Whenever I can, I’ll also be sharing Canadian developers’ stories. SxSW is one of the big tech conferences, so many Canadian developers and startups make it a point to come here every year to make sure they’re on top of what’s going on in the industry, as well as to be seen and heard. If you have the time and the funds, I recommend coming down to SxSW and experiencing the sessions, the collective brainpower, the vibe, and yes, the partying. All work and no play makes you a dull developer, after all.

Finally, I’m here to help the Internet Explorer team promote the very-soon-to-be-final IE9. Here’s a browser that we can proudly say gives the best of both worlds: it’s as compliant as our very own nitpicky legal department (no more coding to quirks!) and thanks to hardware acceleration, it runs like snakes on ice. I’ll be checking in with the IE9 team, helping out at the Austin JavaScript Party on Sunday and talking to developers about the troika of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and how IE9 supports it.

Keep an eye on this blog for my reports from South by Southwest! I promise you’ll be informed and entertained.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the text of the sign:

I understand how scissors can beat paper, and I get how rock can beat scissors, but there’s no way paper can beat rock.

Paper is supposed to magically wrap around rock leaving it immobile? Why can’t paper do this to scissors? Screw scissors, why can’t paper do this to people? Why aren’t sheets of college ruled notebook paper constantly suffocating students as they attempt to take notes in class? I’ll tell you why, because paper can’t beat anybody, a rock would tear it up in two seconds.

When I play rock paper scissors, I always choose rock. Then when somebody claims to have beaten me with their paper I can punch them in the face with my already clenched fist and say “Oh sorry, I thought paper would protect you.”

Now I can go to Austin.

Here are a couple of pics from Friday’s party, CanLIT (Canadian Livers In Training), Accordion City’s pre-South by Southwest party. And yes, that’s my mobile developer battle cry on my T-shirt.

Giving up after only two (really pathetic) attempts? Slacker.

I’ve just come back from Seattle where I’ve been attending Microsoft’s 2011 Global MVP Summit, the annual gathering of Most Valuable Professionals, who are Microsoft’s most keen customers: they not only use our stuff, they help other people use it, they share their knowledge with others and they build communities. They’re like a volunteer evangelist army!

Part of the purpose of the Summit is to reward the MVPs for their work and fanhood by showing them a good time. There are parties galore, with the biggest one saved for last. The big end-of-Summit party was held at Seattle’s Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners. There was food aplenty, booze aplenty-er, and a chance to go on the field and have some fun.

I couldn’t resist stepping up to the plate and trying my turn at bat. I didn’t have a bat handy, but I made do:

…after which I ran the bases while playing the accordion. I’ve always wanted to do that.

We then decided to watch the band. I’ve seen a gazillion classic rock cover bands and wasn’t expecting to be impressed, but I was wrong. The Beatniks, who’d been giving a stage in the middle of the field, played a very tight, rocked-out set of some of the best covers of tunes from the ‘60s and ‘70s I’ve ever heard.

While they were between sets, we checked with the band to see if I could join them for a number. The band were intrigued and willing, but the stage manager said “no”.

When the Beatniks came back on stage, they played a half-dozen numbers and then then Bobby, vocalist and rhythm guitarist, said “Hey, there’s a guy who wanted to do some Steppenwolf on accordion, and we want him up here! Come on up, Accordion Man!”

Damir captured the end result on his camera, and you can see the video at the top of this article. They later invited me up to help out with Free Bird by ‘Skynyrd. Who doesn’t yell “Free Bird!” when a band asks for requests?

Finally, when it came time to play an encore number, Bobby yelled out: “Accordion Man! Do you know E flat?”

“It’s the one between D and E!” I replied.

“Well, you just passed the test! Come on up!”

And thus I joined the band for one more number, Shout by the Isley Brothers. It’s a two-chorder, and since my academic career resembles “Bluto’s”, it’s only natural that I know every song on the Animal House soundtrack.

Pictured above is the view from my seat on Air Canada’s flight 540, the daily direct Seattle-to-Accordion City flight that leaves the west coast at 8:00 a.m. Pacific and touches down just before 3:30 p.m. Eastern. The only real snag in the trip was the incredibly long customs line at the end which resulted from several out-of-country flights landing at Pearson’s Terminal One at roughly the same time.

I won’t be in town terribly long, as I’m scheduled to go to Austin from the 9th through the 16th for South by Southwest, where I’ll be attending the sessions in the Interactive part of the conference and helping Microsoft with the Internet Explorer 9 promotions they’ll be doing there. There’s a party on Sunday the 13th that Austin JavaScript is throwing and for which Microsoft is the Platinum sponsor. They’re expecting anywhere from 500 to 1,000 people to talk HTML5, eat real Tex-Mex (not that horrible stuff that passes for it here in Canada) and drink Shiner Bock. I think I can get into that.

Although most people think of “SxSW” as a music conference – not a surprise, since that’s how it got started – it’s since grown into a conference with three branches: the original Music branch, the Film branch and the Interactive branch. When Interactive was added, it was the smallest of the three, but over the years, it’s grown in size and importance, with influential bloggers and technologists helping fuel interest. SxSW Interactive has become one of the conferences where people try to promote their software or site into a hit, with Twitter being the most notable one. It got its big boost at SxSW 2007, when all the “A-list” bloggers started using it to keep track of the whereabouts of their friends as well as find out which parties were the happening ones. Jay Goldman recently told me that Interactive is now the biggest of the three parts that make up SxSW.

Pictured above is the logo for CanLIT, which despite what it sounds like, has nothing to do with literature. It’s short for Canadian Livers in Training, and it’s a warm-up party for Accordion City citizens going to SxSW and those who wish they were going. When I went to my first SxSW in 2008, I was surprised at the number of people from Canada I kept running into, and how many of them were from Toronto. As I often like to say, Canada has been punching above its weight class when it comes to tech since Alexander Graham Bell, and it seems we like to drink above our weight class as well.

CanLIT takes place tonight and if you’re going to SxSW or wish you could, there’s still time and tickets for the party – just visit the site for the full details. I plan to be there, so if you’re attending, please do say “hi”.