RailsConf 2008: Friday Early Morning

(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)