Daniel Burka’s FOWD London presentation

I was recently at the FOWD London event, put on by the ever busy Carsonified team. There were a slew of good presentations, of which I haven’t really said much (yet), but one of the standouts was from Daniel Burka of Digg, Pownce and Mozilla fame.

What I liked about the presentation was that although Daniel was actually talking about design, the core principles are exactly the same as those I’ve been pushing in my software teams for a while. They also are extremely reminiscent of the key tenets of Agile development.

Less is More

One of my favorite tenets for software development. My preferred way of stating this is:

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This is always the first principle I try to establish with any of my software teams. In Daniel’s parlance, it comes out as “Iteration is subtraction too. Try to remove as much as you add”. For those of us practicing Agile, that might sound like “Refactor, refactor, refactor”!

Build extensible frameworks

The mantra:

Leverage, extensibility and re-use. Todd Papaioannou (yeah, I’m claiming it!)

will be extremely familiar to those who have worked on my projects. By this I mean that a key goal for all software that I build is to continually review whether it is stove piped, or whether it is either a) leveraging other software already out there, or b) someone else can leverage or extend it. Think plugin architectures. Nothing drives me more crazy than people with the NIH attitude wanting to reinvent the wheel. Do you know how many XML parsers/serializers I’ve seen??

In Daniel’s presentation he talks about the difference in Architecture, the High and Low road. His preference is the Low road, which gives you lots of reusable idioms to construct your final product. This is the same message I push in software development. Which leads nicely onto …

Continually Iterate

Again, one of the core tenets of Agile development, this is summed up in the KISS approach. Do the simplest thing first that works, get it out there, and then see if it works. If it doesn’t iterate quickly. Lots of software developers get mired in the mud of trying to build super edifices, when all they need to do is to do something much more simple.

In fact, Iterative design as a means of designing adaptable websites was the general theme of Daniel’s presentation, and I think it’s spot on. You never know exactly how the humans that use your interface, game or software product are going to react, and what they are going to do. That’s a lesson I learnt with running Terafirma. But you have to be prepared to iterate quickly if there is a problem, or a concerted need for improvement.

Here’s the video of the presentation:

From Future of Web Design on Vimeo.

You may also want to follow along with the slides:

[Updated - May 25]

Looks like Daniel has updated his slides for Mesh Conference. They now include a case study of the Digg Comments system.

Technorati Tags: fowd, webdesign, agile, daniel burka

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