MIX '11 — Day 3
Today was the last day of the conference. There were sessions.
Bigger, Faster, Stronger: Optimizing ASP.NET Applications
The title to this talk was a little misleading as I was kind of expecting a talk about server-side performance, but it turned out to be pretty much exclusively about client-side performance. So yeah, Y-Slow and Page Speed are both great tools and you should use them, but I already knew that.
Oh yeah and if you're interested, you should read Steve Souders' book.
One comment, the guy doing the talk did a lot of packing/minification/etc. dynamically with HttpHandlers. Don't do that. Do it in your build step.
Miguel de Icaza: State of the Mono
Given that Mono is kind of important to the stuff I get paid to work on at the moment, it seemed like a good idea to go see Miguel's talk.
Right now he seems to be pretty focused on iOS/Android tables/phones and he talked about:
- MonoTouch
- Mono for Android
- Moonlight
- Manos de Mono
- Turning into an Apple fanboy.
It was good to find out what Miguel was focusing on. It was less good to find out he was focusing on things completely unrelated to the way we're using Mono.
UX Lightning Talks
- Magicians Get Design
- Extending Human DNA with Design
- On Brains, Football and Hobbits
- Farming for Ideas
I think "Farming for Ideas" was the best talk with a message along the lines of "You can cultivate ideas by realizing that ideas beget ideas and letting them happen." Kind of along the lines of "Sketching is great because you can prototype lots of things without overcommitting to the first idea you bump into in a bar."
Good JavaScript Habits for C# Developers
This was the second talk of the day about stuff I already knew of. There's this guy called Douglas Crockford. He wrote a book. You should read it. He wrote a tool. You should use it. He did some videos. You should watch them.
Want a little more than that? I will assert that JavaScript is actually a pretty damn good language and that you actually have to learn it rather than trying to hobble along implementing C#/Java/whatever idioms. Crockford's work has a whole bunch of arguments to back up that assertion, so I won't.
Final Session
I totally bailed as there wasn't anything wort attending in the final slot.