Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Vote for the SxSW Panels!

by Josh Holmes via Josh Holmes on 8/19/2009 11:50:36 PM

One of the many things that I love about SxSW is that they let the attendees vote for the sessions that they want to see. They are also very realistic that the attendees are not picking the sessions, but they do count for 30% of the vote. Their whole process is laid out on the main page at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/. It’s 30% attendee votes, 30% staff and 40% advisory board.

The reason that I’m bringing this is that I’ve submitted some sessions this year for SxSW and I need your votes. Typically I don’t do this blatant of a self promotion and/or plea for help but I’m up against some of the best social marketers in the business. :)

Specifically, I’ve got two that are up for votes right now.

The first one is a joint session with James Ward who is one of the technical evangelists from Adobe. He and I are talking about the best and worst practices that we see at our clients every single day.

Title: Best and Worst Practices Building Rich Internet App

Description:
Seen a good RIA lately? A bad one? Because RIAs provide a similar user experience to desktop applications (with the ease of a web/browser-based deployment), confusion results from potentially conflicting practices depending on whether one approaches the RIA as a desktop or a web application. Let’s stop the madness.

Questions:

1. What is RIA?
2. What technologies are considered RIA technologies?
3. When should you use RIA?
4. When should you not use RIA?
5. What's the learning curve for desktop developers to jump into RIA?
6. What's the learning curve for web developers to jump into RIA?
7. What are the best practices for RIAs?
8. What are the worst practices for RIA?
9. How does one deal with multiple form factors?
10. What's the best architectural guidance for a RIA?

The second session that I submitted is a joint session with Jason Gilmore, resident PHP Guru and consultant. He and I are talking about intelligently scaling your applications through cloud computing and our lessons learned actually doing just that.

Title: You Build It, They Come, Your App Scales

1. What is Scale?
2. What's the difference between Scale and Performance?
3. What are the ways to scale an application?
4. How do you determine what scale you need?
5. What is cloud computing?
6. What is Azure?
7. How well does PHP work on Azure?
8. What considerations are needed to run on Azure?
9. How do you geo-locate an application?
10. How hard is it to get started with cloud computing?

I need your help getting the word out and the votes flowing. Please tweet about the sessions and/or this post and drive some awareness of my sessions! :)