The ever-experimental Paul Ortchanian (Blast Radius), has been kind enough to post the files from from his presentation, grab them from http://www.reflektions.com/miniml/uploads/presentation_ff08.zip

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

I received the following response from Miha via email this morning. Please contribute to the dialog by commenting further!

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

Miha’s quote begins here:

Thank you John, appreciate! On the other hand i wonder if my contribution to the conference was not taken too much as an “entertainment” ???

There is a problem all software companies share (the “burnout factor” for instance) :

There is nature around us and in us. As soon as one separates electricity out of “Her” and starts developing and intensifying it “downward”, this becomes a “sub-nature”…all the way down to the nano-technology and beyond.

If one starts with the journey of inner human (soul/spirirt) development, one begins climbing creatively above the nature, into the “supra-nature”.

I belive firmly that the “supra-nature” and the “sub-nature” must be in the balance in human life and deeper we go into one, higer we have to strech and develop above into the other one, or we can go sick in various ways.

Poeple working in software industry (and indeed the grat part of the younger generation nowdays) have to constantly live and work in the sub-nature realm and i think the interactive musical process, the way i try to develop it, is one of the ways to gather inner strenght above to cope with below. It stimulates and brings inner life. And of course, as value added, it doesn’t “harm” young people to (re-)discover great classical music as relevant to the preassures of their entrepreneurial persuits?!

I wander if anyone got the understanding of this dimension last Wednesday morning???

www.mihavision.com

What can I say?  I love BitchWhoCodes (Stacy Mulcahy)… I anticipate any developer who has lived through some of the scenarios she was mentioning and who saw her presentation at FlashForward would say the same thing.  She came off like some sort of super-hero, sent to rescue developers from the bowels of project purgatory.

What she did was step back and look, from the perspective of a developer, at the overall development process typically found at a misguided agency or company.  The sad truth is that most companies do not think about how to actually make their employees happy.  Companies will bend over backwards to get a “rock star” developer, but then often times expect he or she to be able to pull some sort of coding rabbit out of the magic hat of late-night, over-caffeinated death marches.

Even companies founded by technically astute, so-called “rock star” developers often forget (walk away from?) the magic that gave them the opportunity to be in the position of influence in which they find themselves; the challenge that made them what they are (were?).

My favorite quote of hers was, “Adding more developers to a project doesn’t solve the problem [of poor planning].  Can 9 women give birth to a baby in a month?” haha

Following is a brief list of my favorite words of wisdom from Stacey:

• “Meaningful innovation is a competitive edge”
• “Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”
• “Constant chaos is not an effective motivator”
• “Schedules have more important purposes than perfection or accuracy”
• “What would MacGyver do?”
• “Just because I know how to do it, doesn’t mean I should be doing it”
• “Deadlines: always closer than they appear”
• “Developers deadlines get shafted when anyone else blows theirs”
• “Anyone is typically a designer”
• “Iterative graphic design can lead to duct tape development”

She was even nice enough to comfort project managers and reassure them that they are in fact very important… what a gal.  But she did emphasize the fact that they need to respect the personal lives of the developers they are coordinating.

Preach on sister, preach on!

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

Two aspiring bloggers have been posting about their journey to Flashforward 2008.  If anyone has more info about these two, by all means fill me in so I can update this post.

In the meantime, you can check out their blog at http://mtatff.wordpress.com/

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

w00t!  The folks at IDEO are working their magic again, this time in the form of a DIY kit for creating Flash based multi-touch interfaces.  That’s right, IDEO-made sorcery is now available to all via the IDEO labs blog at labs.ideo.com, complete with an ActionScript API (on Google Code) … how can one not love that?

Apparently Flash was well suited for the task at hand.  According to the team at IDEO, “”Flash proved to be a very nimble way to support this type of exploration”.

You can check out the actual video showcasing the interaction on the IDEO labs blog.

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.