Last night Thursday 23rd August 2012, I went along the What Do You Know? event held at The Appartment a great little place I used to frequent when I was working on Exhibition Street.

Earlier this year I was at the Web Directions South Code event, so anything put on the Web Directions South team is great and you should attend. In particular the up coming conference in mid October 2012, Sydney.

So back to Thursday nights event. There were 12 lightning talks, each 5 minutes long, I’ll list them off with links to what was most interesting / their entire presentation.

I wanted to talk about a few that stood out to me, mostly because it’s relevant to what is happening at Picnic Software at the moment.

The 4 presentations that stood out as very relevant to what we’re doing at Picnic Software were:

• Mark – 5 Simple Things You’ll Forget When You Start a Startup
• Joel – DevOps for Startups: Tales from the trenches
• Matt – What the $%&# is UX Design?
• Will – The User is Drunk

I started off by trying to fit it in to this post, but it ended up longer than I expected so it’s here: How much to scratch your own itch as a Startup?.

Summary of the event with links, in order of appearance:

The State of Our Web Performance Union
John Bristowe, @JohnBristowe

Content being deliver over the web is getting larger faster than bandwidth increases. Aim for performance. Have a look at a data trends httparchive.org

DevOps for Startups: Tales from the trenches
Lucas Chan, @geekylucas

Monitor and be ready for spikes. Uptime is critical. Don’t build what you can rent.

What the $%&# is UX Design?
Matt Magain, @mattymcg

Watch this on YouTube and check out uxmastery.com

A whirlwind tour of D3.js
Tony Milne, @tonymilne

It’s very powerful, check it out d3js.org/

A brief introduction to the Gamepad API
Anette Bergo, @anettebgo

html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/doodles/gamepad/

Getting Sourcey with Javascript
Michael Mifsud, @xzyfer

Source Maps are the future of debugging the web – html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/

Startup Myths Debunked
Joel Friedlaender, @jfriedlaender

Named some common myths that are all likely wrong; failure is high e.g. 9 in 10 Startups fail, your idea is worthless, you need venture capital, the only costs are your time.

CSS checkboxes and the ridiculous things you can build with them
Ryan Seddon, @ryanseddon

cssn.in/ja/wdyk2012

50 handy things you’ve never heard of
Charlie Somerville, @charliesome

charlie.bz/presos/50resources/

From zero to superpimp mobile web app using Tres
Julio Cesar Ody, @julio_ody

Julio amazingly wrote some non-trivial JavaScript using Backbone.js and his library:
tres.io

The User is Drunk
Will Dayble, @willdayble

Good UI is ‘not there’, say things twice (icon and words), you can’t beat over the shoulder testing (watching your user).

5 Simple Things You’ll Forget When You Start a Startup
Mark Mansour, @markmansour

Marketing (is critical and not easy), Product (focus on benefits and customers), Promotion (talk to customers), Price (Tiers and known costs for customers), Place (don’t shout at your customers, go find them)