Mozilla was kind enough to send me to the Beyond the Code 2015 in Ottawa today. When I went to PyCon back in April, the sessions I felt I got the most out of were the non-technical ones so this seemed like a fun and useful way to spend the day.

My favourite talk of the day was given by Kat Bautista on Drawing as a Way of Thinking which was a funny and insightful talk on using drawings as a means of visual note-taking both for yourself and in front of a whiteboard as a way of facilitating meetings. Not “draw me like one of your french girls” drawing but rather a visual, cartoony shorthand for capturing ideas.

Having suffered through overzealous project management from time to time (e.g. two project managers for five developers) I could relate to her description of Gantt Charts as a way of to avoid having meaningful discussions (“Look at the spreadsheets I can make!”) but I think sketches can also be used to obscure issues, people love pictures and can easily overlook a lack of substance behind them.

I had read a number of books and papers on sketching for design as part of a Software Usability course I took a few years ago so I had already been exposed to some of the ideas before but I still got a lot out of the talk. That usability course was for the most part disappointing, the focus was on doing studies to evaluate existing user interfaces with basically nothing at all on how one would go about creating such a thing in the first place.

As I mentioned, Mozilla also sent me to PyCon 2015 back in April. I was remiss in capturing my thoughts back then. After nearly six months what has stayed most with me was Pete Fein’s talk Free Software, Free People on his experiences with Telecomix, in particular, one slide, where he urged people to be active and work for causes they care about (whatever they may be.)

http://www.lowleveldrone.com/mozilla/2015/09/23/beyond-the-code.html