Posts Tagged ‘conferences’

What not to buy in 2011

This is the time of year when the Interwebs are flooded with “what to buy…” consumer guides. In contrast, the things I discuss below are much cheaper, saving you both time and money, because in the end you won’t be shopping for them at all.

(An aside to Web services freelancers: you know, if we stop offering these things, people will stop thinking they can obtain them. Give it a thought.)

What not to buy in 2011

  • Support for IE 6. Freelancers–put a clause in your contracts that requires a $10,000 deposit before you even start up IETester or the like.
  • Meetings requiring developer attendance.

    "Sunday," © Peter Paul Jacques

    Described variously as “toxic,” “a disaster,” and “the biggest productivity killers for programmers,” meetings are relics from the twentieth century which have as much relevance to your technology projects as do carbon paper and stenography.
  • The cost of a stern “butts-in-chairs” policy. Savvy, experienced developers know what conditions make them productive, and these are various. Nobody lists compulsory enclosure in a cube farm among those conditions.
  • Huge office spaces. Since you’re not having meetings, and you’re letting your team co-work or telecommute, you don’t need all that much space anymore.
  • Fake work.
    Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem

    This should be obvious, but somebody had to write a whole book about it to expose the problem.

  • Expensive conference fees. As Rebecca Murphey noted, the most useful conferences for Web technology seem to be ones organized by and for practitioners, who aren’t always bankrolled by deep-pocketed corporations.
  • Tag soup, nouvelle cuisine style. Regrettably, HTML5 provides just as many opportunities for lousy markup (“<div>-itis,” overuse of class and ID attributes) to the novice and/or the unconcerned, as  did earlier HTML standards.

What’s dropped off your 2011 shopping list?

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

Posted on: by mejarc 2 Comments

Yesterday I opened the fridge at home, and was astonished to find these:

1.5 Liters of Bottled Water

Fifteen, even ten, years ago, these items would be unremarkable in my kitchen. I might’ve even remembered purchasing them, rather than regarding them as puzzling stowaways. But thanks to the Web, I’m now enlightened to these harmless-looking bottles’ sinister nature. Each is a crystalline vessel of needless expense, inefficient resource usage, and toxic compounds . So how did they end up in my house?

Each bottle is an artifact from a conference. Each is the result of a conference organizer’s good intentions and relatively enlightened self interest. The original notion seemed to be concern for conference attendees’ physical comfort (“Keep hydrated through those long days of sitting in chilly, darkened meeting rooms! Here, take a bottle of water…”), combined with greater awareness of the ruinous health consequences of drinking soda, and the practices of corporate branding, to create the now ordinary half-liter water bottle such as you see here, and such as you probably have lurking in your own refrigerator.

How is this a problem? We got something for free, right?

Uh, no.  We’re paying for it,  whether we drink this water or not.

We’re paying for:

  • The delivery of so many single-serving bottles full of what is often just tap water
  • The janitors necessary to remove these used-only-once water bottles from conference rooms and wastebaskets
  • The energy inputs required to recycle these bottles, if that’s even available.  (To that conference’s credit, one of these party favors used 100% recycled plastic for its bottle)
  • The landfill space required to bury these bottles when recycling isn’t supported

And we’re missing a great opportunity for tech conferences to be as innovative as they claim to be in their publicity. Want to be truly “disruptive, or “2.0,” or “the future”? Hand conference attendees collapsible steel cups with the conference logo printed on them, and point the way to the drinking fountains.

I doubt we will notice anything missing from our fridges.