Welcome John Wilker!

My company, EffectiveUI, made a really cool hire - one that I'm pretty excited about. John Wilker will be coming on board as our first Community Evangelist.

It's the first time we've attempted something like this, so we're making it up as we go, but I think it will benefit us by letting us take the time to show the work we've been doing, have a better vehicle for recruitment and collaboration, and encourage and give something back to the community.

One thing that we all want to make clear is that EffectiveUI isn't buying 360|Conferences, nor are we buying our way into free sponsorships or easy speaking opportunities. Tom and John will continue to run that venture separately, and we all have an interest in keeping them an objective third party. The value of 360|Flex, built on community, would go down if any one company in the community took over.

In any case, everyone's excited, and now we get to see what John can help us do.

See the Data, Be the Data at 360|Flex

Juan Sanchez and I just got done with what turned out to be a really fun presentation on Data Visualization at 360|Flex. We had code samples that we didn't get to, but hearing feedback it seems like people were fine with that and enjoyed the chat about theory a bit.

Here's the presentation:

See the Data, Be the Data

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: juan sanchez)

The code samples are up here - if you're not using git, you can still click the download link and get a tarball of the source code. Thanks to everyone who came to see the talk.

UPDATE:

I noticed that this preso is up on AMP now, and as I watched it I noticed how I failed to answer the question about the 2D picture for 1D data in the olympics example. I talked about lying and all that stuff, but what I didn't get was that as long as the *area* of the circles showing the gold medals was in proportion, then the graph was true to the data. Sorry for being misleading, there, I was a little thrown by the question, but I should have be able to get it.

Flex on Rails at 360|Flex

My Flex and Rails presentation at 360 went really well, and thanks to everyone who came that early in the morning.

All the code can be found at Git-hub here

And the presentation can be found up here, or embedded right here:

Flex And Rails

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: flex 360)

Luckily the 360 Guys also had a sweet video set up which you can watch through Adobe Media Player. Ted Patrick has more here, since I'm not sure how to include the badge that links directly in just yet:

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/08/360flex-15-sessions-posted.php
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/08/360flex-sessions-media-rss-feed.php

Again, thanks a lot for showing up and I hope the presentation was helpful.

DHH on the UIRC

I was fortunate to be able to take part in an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson on the User Interface Resource Center.

As always, David was on point about the ingredients of good software, both from a framework and an interface perspective.

Process is on my mind a lot these days: process for building great software, process for dealing with clients and features, and it's great to have a public figure like DHH to be able to point to, who's made the arguments again and again, and just has the rap down.

Great read, and some nice audio clips too.