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My 26th of September at LSNA2016
Here's a running note dump of my day 1 at Liferay Symposium North America 2016, here in Chicago.
This is just to pique your curiosity if you couldn't make it out here AND your interests happen to match mine. Wait for the slide decks and presentations to be shared by Liferay so you get it all.
Bryan did it again, making his point with the same efficiency he preaches. I recalled his keynote from 2015 where he began with a heart-warming picture of children interacting with technology at Disney World, and came full circle with a sobering and grounding message not to lose track of what really matters as we embark on our digital ventures.
This year, Bryan took us through a history lesson on the culture of design – one that cuts across all industries – whereby the average and median population has traditionally been targeted. The challenge he left us with was to heed the need to design to the edges, so that our designs, while scaling for the majority, do not neglect the minority and certainly not the “jagged” reality of the majority as well.
Lots to think about. Relevant keynote.
“I want to check:
How many people watched the banner on the home page
How many people clicked on the link on the home page
How many typed into the form
How many actually completed and submitted the form
Etc..”
Audience Targeting is a framework – fully extensible to meet specific company requirements. Rules tutorials that show how to segment users based on custom rules are available on the wiki, etc.
I was really impressed by the experimental mood-driven targeting app that Julio demonstrated. No better way to say the sky is the limit than show a great (albeit forced) example.
Good stuff!
Ray’s gentle introduction to the struggle behind “IT’s platform for diversification” started to get my attention when he said “coupling exists in the IT industry at many levels, not just between one piece of code and another piece of code…”.
I thought this was a really fresh perspective on thinking about ROI for everyone – from programmers (IT decision makers), all the way up (or out) to executive decision makers.
The real takeaway from Ray’s presentation was to understand the importance of decoupling at ALL levels of IT development through delivery. My paraphrased bullet points are below.
“Reinventing yourself every few years is bloody costly”
I’ve got to say. My boss’s boss’s boss is a fantastic talker. That’s likely not going to impact my raise any, but hey, it IS true!
You should check out this presentation if you are an IT thinker/professional who may be accustomed to thinking about change inside out, with IT as your greatest influencer. Brian forces a broader thinking mindset, outlining the main drivers for digital transformation. Great talk for IT entrepreneurs and decision-makers alike.
Glorious whitefish! What else is there to say!
<insert picture here I was too busy eating to snap a picture of my plate. By the time I realized that, the food was all gone./>
If there was one presentation for a developer to attend at LSNA16, I think it would have to be this one. I think…
I had heard of Slack from a developer friend and even used it a little bit in the last year with a closed group of friends, but man, the good stuff is beneath the surface.
Andrew introduced Slack features real quick in the light of how his team used slack channels as a step toward dispelling the absolute absence of phatic communication in globally distributed teams.
“Slack is a javascript web app wrapped in electron.”
Fascinating!
This session was mostly a look at the Control menu in Liferay DXP.
The dockbar has been overhauled. Repeat. The dockbar has been overhauled.
Lots of improvements to navigating around Control Panel and User Account settings. Much improved UX.
Content Authoring improvements include:
Questions I asked:
Jose Dominguez was super-welcoming of emails. Nice, tight presentation.
Decadent Ice cream brownie. WHAT!?!?
So good.
“One does not simply walk into Mordor”
That is how you begin a discussion of security. Not that the evil lord Sauron is an ideal example of an IT Director persona (no offence meant).
That’s how Jeff Handa began his presentation as he walked through a breadth-first list of common Infrastructure precautions and best practices.
Liferay is just on top of whatever foundation platform we have chosen. So pick a supported platform that is familiar, patched, and monitored.
Ryan talked through the madness of a UI/UX upgrade on top of an actual version upgrade of liferay.com.
“What have I done?”
You know, he mentioned that every upgrade and redesign effort often feels like an existential crisis. For my part, and maybe this says too much about myself, but I have experienced existential crises of earth-shattering proportions with something as simple as a cut-and-paste operation. Again, that’s just me.
He shared a nice checklist of questions to ask yourself before embarking on a redesign/upgrade effort. Lots of good common-sense tips and spectrum of UX options to consider. Great talk for UX designers and primarily front-end developers.
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Got to catch the train out. Will post tomorrow's notes... tomorrow!