Wow, it’s hard to believe South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest for interactive professionals in Austin, TX, is only a few days away. We at Blue Flavor are all excited for another year of great sessions, great networking, and great fun. Keith and Nick will be speaking, and the entire Blue Flavor crew will be in attendance.
The schedule of talks and panels has recently been released, and in going over it, I thought I’d highlight a few sessions that seemed particularly interesting to me.
Respect!—Some real industry heavyweights in Jeffrey Zeldman, Douglas Bowman, Jason Santa-Maria, Erin Kissane, and Liz Danzico will be discussing the general lack of respect and understanding our profession sees from outsiders.
Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs—Any API that wants to succeed needs to be developer-friendly. Engineers from significant mashable web apps including Facebook, Pownce, and DabbleDB will discuss best practices for API-building.
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts—Michael Lopp and John Gruber will discuss a classic design dilemma: If you strive for greatness in your design, you will meet resistance; if you strive to avoid resistance, you can’t do great design.
Design is in the Details—Naz Hamid, one of my personal favorite web designers, will look at how an interactive designer can tighten up and bring layouts, comps and designs to a final and brilliant polish to take it from “nearly there” to “there”.
Everyone’s A Design Critic—After a great presentation last year, Jason Santa Maria an Rob Weychert are joining up again, this time to talk about how to give a useful design critique and how to get good, valuable feedback from clients.
Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together—Paul Hammond, George Oates, Simon Willison, Matt Biddulph, and Dave Shea will get together to discuss the working of specialists together in teams.
Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?—In this panel, representatives from major browser makers including Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla will be answering all the hot-button questions. Should be a good one.
There are definitely more great-sounding panels on the lineup; this is just a few that jumped off the page as interesting to me personally and potentially relevant to the readers of this blog. One word of advice for SXSW-goers: don’t feel obligated to attend panels on topics that are in your area of experience or presented by people you know or respect. If you’re a CSS guru, then there’s a good chance you’re not going to learn much by going to a CSS panel. Go check out something different. There are tons of panels on psychology, gaming, sex, and business that sound fascinating to me, despite not being so directly relevant to my everyday work. And, it’s great that you want to support your buddies who are presenting, but they’ll understand if there’s a talk that you’re going to get more out of.
And of course, there are the parties. I try not to plan too far ahead when it comes to social events, but a few things I’m looking forward to include:
South by Northwest—Blue Flavor is sponsoring this event again this year, and having been there the last two years (while not an emplyee of Blue Flavor), I can assure you, it’s one of the top two or three parties every time. Iron Cactus has terrific margaritas, and that’s really all I need to have a good night.
SXSW Bowling—The last two years, Bryan Veloso’s bowling event has been a ton of fun. This year, Bryan’s unable to attend, but the very capable and kind folks over at n’clud have take it upon themselves to make sure the rolling goes on.
The Great British Booze-Up—Last year, this was definitely right up there with SXNW, vying for “party of the year” award. This year, the two are once again back-to-back. Us Blue Flavorites will definitely be getting our drink on with our friends from across the pond. See you there!
The Big Digg Shinndigg—It’s the last night. It goes until 4am. It’s sponsored by our buddies at Digg.com (who definitely know how to party). And, it’s at the PureVolume Ranch. What more do you need to know, really?
Also of relevance: there’s a great new webapp for planning your SXSW trip—check it out. You can put together your schedule and then subscribe to an iCalendar feed of it.
If you’re heading to Austin, leave us a comment and we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for you. While you’re there, feel free to come right up to any of us from Blue Flavor. We don’t bite, and we’d love to meet you!
Hm. Were you peeking at my iCal schedule? I think you were. Good picks!
As a noob, I started to get a little freaked out about how much is happening, but not planning too much sounds like a good…plan. Thanks for the tip.
Wait, you guys don’t bite? Forget it, I’m not going, now. (; I kid! See you there!
…and don’t forget MobileMonday Austin, which Brian will be speaking at!
ceo
Only 3 more days until the craziness begins. I’m looking forward to SXNW, as well as any Blue Flavor after parties (Rock Band perhaps?) that happen in the wee hours of the morning.