(notes from mostly Randy and a little from me)
Chad Fowler
- Reflecting on the history of Ruby/Rails conferences of old
- Lost Last Ep. apparently glitched last night, thus everyone downloading Lost
DHH
- actually saying something nice about Joel
- used to take Joel’s columns to meetings to say “this is what we should be doing”
Joel Spolsky
- slide of Angelina Jolie… the only slide… trying to get a higher evaluation score
- now showing a Brad Pitt picture… so he’s not a male chauvinist pig
- slide of ian somerhalder… another good looking guy, but brad beats him in a google fight
- he lies about the number slides
- brad is ipod, ian is a zune
- blue chip vs off brand
- blue chip chair is herman miller… lots of knockoffs… like the ones we have at work…
- Angelina is blue chip… Uma Thurman is off brand
- Brad is blue chip… Iam is off brand
- Great software
- makes people happy
- obsesses over aesthetics
- observes the culture code
- Joel does lolcats
- goes through a scenario about how it sucks to install updates on windows…
- the ui sucks
- the progress bars are misleading
- the system now doesn’t recognize one of your devices.
- You can’t unplug the device. Tell us First. Fuckhead.
- this experience sucks… makes people unhappy
- Learned helplessness is a book about how lack-of-control makes people unhappy
- just do something that makes you feel in control
- Abercrombie & Fitch checkout example
- doesn’t give you a choice over how you checkout… it is a 4 stage process, and you have to do it in their order
- Amazon example
- you can change your information, you can do whatever you want in any order… you are in control
- Tips for making people happy
- Put the user in control
- Positive feedback
- Tips for obsessing over aesthetics
- iphone is way more popular than samsung blackjack
- but iphone is slower, has a smudge screen rather than a keyboard, doesn’t have exchange compatibility,
- but the iphone is beautiful… “if you accidentally swallowed it, it would go right down”
- in paris, they don’t have fire escapes, because they are ugly… it’s more important to look good than to survive a fire
- it works… people prefer something that looks good over something that is better
- Tips for observing the culture code
- the ford explorer has 88 deaths per year
- the toyota camry has 41 deaths per year… it’s not safer to be in an SUV, actually… even though people THINK they feel safer
- SUVs have soft corners, airbags everywhere, cupholders, and are up high. they trick us into feeling better and safer.
- web 2.0 don’t have visions, they go to parties
- Misattribution: when you have coffee, you enjoy the movie more… it’s not the movie, it’s the coffee!
- ends the talk playing “Sweet Home Alabama”... that was a good talk!
(it was interesting, because he didn’t have a final point. At the end he compared some blog posts that DHH and _why wrote about ruby and it had all these good words (passion, love, ...). He swapped them to their antonym and labeled it Java. I expected him to follow with telling us that there was a common misattribution with rails and these feelings and that we could find the same else where)
May 30, 2008 (5 years ago) | Tags: railsconf2008
