SDForum Panel Pictures

Ho John Lee posted some pictures from the design panel that I moderated on Wednesday at the SDForum's Web Based Architectures event.

The panelists offered good insights and were funny -- e.g., if you look closely at the pic, you'll see that Kevin Burton, the guy sitting to my right has a Mac laptop with him. His heedworthy advice/observation on how startups succeed: lack of resources makes you focus on the essential. His observation on coding for Internet Explorer: it totally sucks and if there's anyone from Microsoft in the audience, you ought to leave the room and start fixing it now. A man who practices what he preaches, Kevin was writing software right up to moment that he started getting questions -- now THAT'S focus. One other good bit of advice from him, that I've heard before, "know what the problem is before you try to solve it".

Alok Bhanot (the "Bh" sounds kind of like a "P") probably got the toughest and most direct questions from the audience because of his position at Ebay. His advice for web architecture: cast the net wide (i.e., don't target any specific platform) and make sure it scales. Truly someone who's been in the public eye, he successfully dodged gave very diplomatic answers to a couple of questions like "What's the most egregious waste of design time you've seen in recent history?" and "If Ebay is taking the role of urban planner (cf. the software as a service model and Ebay's growing community of developers), are you working more towards a planned city like Philadelphia or towards a more bazaar-esque Los Angeles?".

Colin Johnson, CEO of EyeTools, covered the design in the visual sense. If you haven't seen the work they do with heatmaps and individual eyeflows, you need to visit the Eyetools blog immediately.

Any one of the keynotes was worth the drive out to PARC, even when under time pressure at work.

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