:Programming Czar

Well just made it through the first day of eduWEB 2008. Just putting the finishing touches on my slides for tomorrow. I’ll be talking about AJAX and how we used it on our athletics site. Will be interesting, being it’s my first time talking at a conference.

When I first walked into the keynote today it really freaked me out because I was like wow this is a huge room. I figure if people divide evenly even with a 1/3 full room it would be scary just cause it’s a really long room. Though after the keynote I went into the room I would be presenting in and it actually made me feel better because it had significantly less tables and didn’t seem as massive.

The keynote speaker, Mark Greenfield, was pretty good. He’s got a firm understanding of what’s going on out there. The talk was pretty much a waste for me though because he was really going through stuff that you “should” know if you keep up with what’s going on out in the tech world. I mean really if you just listened to TWiT every week you would know most of what was said. The talk was more about what is possible now more then the future, with only brief mentions of where things might go. Though for those people unlike myself (which I’d put in the high 90’s), this talk probably filled them in on a lot of things that are going on out there.

A couple things he missed, which I really thought he wouldn’t with his Minority Report reference, was the big things going on with multi-touch inputs. This is directly web related but actually is something was are definitely going to have to watch out for on a usability side once more of these things are in the wild. With the iPhone, Microsoft Surface, and cool homebrew tricks we will need to try to make sure we can take full advantage of these things.

Another thing I feel he missed was that along with mobile, consoles are something you have to pay attention to. With the Wii and party now having browsers (you can even get Opera on your DS) and consoles having such a huge install base, these are going to be more devices that potential students will get to your website.

The second talk was nothing to write home about so I won’t

Well time to hit the sack and hope everything goes good tomorrow.

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