Journal tags: adventure

I’ve been to a lot of events and I’ve seen a lot of talks. I find that, even after all this time, I always get something out of every presentation I see. Kudos to anyone who’s got the guts to get up on stage and share their thoughts.

But there are some talks that are genuinely special. When they come along, it’s a real privilege to be in the room. Wilson’s talk, When We Build was one of those moments. There are some others that weren’t recorded, but will always stay with me.

Earlier this year, I had the great honour of opening the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I definitely felt a lot of pressure, and I did my utmost to set the scene for the day. The final talk of the day was delivered by my good friend Ethan. He took it to another level.

Like I said at the time:

Look, I could gush over how good Ethan’s talk was, or try to summarise it, but there’s really no point. I’ll just say that I felt the same sense of being present at something genuinely important that I felt when I was in the room for his original responsive web design talk at An Event Apart back in 2010. When the video is released, you really must watch it.

Well, the video has been released and you really must watch it. Don’t multitask. Don’t fast forward. Set aside some time and space, and then take it all in.

The subject matter, the narrative structure, the delivery, and the message come together in a unique way.

If, having watched the presentation, you want to dive deeper into any of Ethan’s references, check out the reading list that accompanies the talk.

I mentioned that I felt under pressure to deliver a good opener for New Adventures. I know that Ethan was really feeling the pressure too. He needn’t have worried. He delivered one of the best conference talks I’ve ever seen.

Thank you, Ethan.

My trip to Nottingham for the New Adventures conference went very well indeed.

First of all, I had an all-day workshop to run. I was nervous. Because I no longer prepare slides for workshops—and instead rely on exercises and discussions—I always feel like I’m winging it. I’m not winging it, but without the security blanket of a slide deck, I don’t have anything to fall back on.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The workshop went great. Well, I thought it went great but you’d really have to ask the attendees to know for sure. One of the workshop participants, Westley Knight, wrote about his experience:

The workshop itself was fluid enough to cater to the topics that the attendees were interested in; from over-arching philosophy to technical detail around service workers and new APIs. It has helped me to understand that learning in this kind of environment doesn’t have to be rigorously structured, and can be shaped as the day progresses.

(By the way, if you’d like me to run this workshop at your company, get in touch.)

With the workshop done, it was time for me to freak out fully about my conference talk. I was set to open the show. No pressure.

Actually, I felt pretty damn good about what I had been preparing for the past few months (it takes me aaages to put a talk together), but I always get nervous about presenting new material—until I’ve actually given the talk in front of a real audience, I don’t actually know if it’s any good or not.

Clare was speaking right after me, but she was having some technical issues. It’s funny; as soon as she had a problem, I immediately switched modes from conference speaker to conference organiser. Instead of being nervous, I flipped into being calm and reassuring, getting Clare’s presentation—and fonts—onto my laptop, and making sure her talk would go as smoothly as possible (it did!).

My talk went down well. The audience was great. Everyone paid attention, laughed along with the jokes, and really listened to what I was trying to say. For a speaker, you can’t ask for better than that. And people said very nice things about the talk afterwards. Sam Goddard wrote about how it resonated with him.

You can peruse the slides from my presentation but they make very little sense out of context. But video of the talk is forthcoming.

The advantage to being on first was that I got my talk over with at the start of the day. Then I could relax and enjoy all the other talks. And enjoy them I did! I think all of the speakers were feeling the same pressure I was, and everybody brought their A-game. There were some recurring themes throughout the day: responsibility; hope; diversity; inclusion.

So New Adventures was already an excellent event by the time we got to Ethan, who was giving the closing talk. His talk elevated the day into something truly sublime.

Look, I could gush over how good Ethan’s talk was, or try to summarise it, but there’s really no point. I’ll just say that I felt the same sense of being present at something genuinely important that I felt when I was in the room for his original responsive web design talk at An Event Apart back in 2010. When the video is released, you really must watch it. In the meantime, you can read through the articles and books that Ethan cited in his presentation.

New Adventures 2019 was worth attending just for that one talk. I was very grateful I had the opportunity to attend, and I still can’t quite believe that I also had the opportunity to speak.

In just over a week, I’ll be giving the opening talk at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I’ll be giving a workshop the day before too. There are still tickets available for both.

I have to admit, I’m kind of nervous about this talk. It’s been quite a while since the last New Adventures, but it’s always had quite the cachet. I think I went to most of them. It’s quite strange—and quite an honour—to shift gears from attendee to speaker.

The talk I’ll be giving is called Building. That might be a noun. That might be a verb. You decide:

Every new medium looks to what has come before for guidance. Web design has taken cues from centuries of typography and graphic design. Web development has borrowed metaphors and ideas from the world of architecture. Let’s take a tour of some of the most influential ideas from architecture that have crossed over into the web, from pattern languages to responsive design. Together we’ll uncover how to build resilient, performant, accessible and beautiful structures that work with the grain of the materials of the web.

This talk builds upon the talk I gave at last year’s An Event Apart called The Way Of The Web. It also reflects many of the ideas in Resilient Web Design. When I gave a run-through of the talk at Clearleft last week, Andy called it a “greatest hits.” For a while there, I was feeling guilty about retreading some ground I’ve covered in previous talks and writings. Then I realised it was pretty arrogant of me to think that anyone in the audience would be familiar with any of it.

Besides, I’ve got a whole new avenue of exploration in this talk. It’s about language and metaphor—how we talk about what we do on the web. I’ve just finished giving another run-through at the Clearleft studio and I’m feeling pretty good about it. That’s good, because I find that giving a talk in a small room to a handful of colleagues is way more stressful than giving a talk to hundreds of people at a conference.

Just as I put together links related to last year’s talk, I figured I’d provide some hyperlinks for anyone interested in the topics raised in this new talk…

Books

• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Creating Killer Websites by David Siegel
• Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockman
• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick
• Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein with Ingrid King, Shlomo Angel and Max Jacobsen
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand

Articles

• A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• Device Agnostic by Trent Walton
• The Work I Like by Ethan Marcotte

Audio

• Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language on Studio 360
• Molly Wright Steenson on Design Notes
• Quebec Bridge Collapse on the Brady Heywood Podcast

Andy has become the gaming world’s equivalent of Howard Carter uncovering the Tutankhamun’s tomb of a hard drive from Infocom containing details of the never-released sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game. In his post, he picks out the salient points from the Lost in La Mancha-like story. In the comments, much hand-wringing ensues about what is and isn’t journalism (answer: who cares?).

I missed the Hitchhiker’s game when I was growing up. I cut my teeth on 8-bit computers; first a ZX-81 and then an Amstrad 464. While I didn’t have the chance to play Douglas Adams’ meisterwerk, there were plenty of other text-only adventure games that sucked me in. I recall some quality stuff coming from the Level 9 studio.

I remember learning BASIC specifically so that I could try create my own adventure games complete with mapped-out locations and a simple verb/noun parser. Adventure games seemed like the natural extension to the choose your own adventure books but far more open to exploration (even if that openness was just a cleverly-crafted illusion). Hypertext—a term used these days almost exclusively to refer to Web-based documents—seems an entirely appropriate way to describe this kind of interactive fiction.

Later this year, I and my fellow adventure game geeks will be able to wallow in nostalgia when the documentary Get Lamp is released. The film will feature interviews with some of the Infocom movers and shakers featured in Andy’s archeological treasure trove.

While I had Matthew in my clutches, I made him show me around the API for They Work For You. Who knew that so much could fun be derived from data about MPs?

First off, there’s Matthew’s game of MP Top Trumps, ‘though he had to call it MP Fab Farts to avoid getting a cease and desist letter.

Then there’s a text adventure built on the API. This is so good! Enter your postcode and you find yourself playing the part of your parliamentary representative with zero experience points and one hundred hit points. You must work your way across the country, doing battle with rival MPs, as you make your way towards Sedgefield, the lair of Blair.

You can play a Web version but for some real old-school fun, try the telnet version. This reminded me of how much I used to love text adventures back in the days of 8-bit computers. I even remember trying to write my own in BASIC.

For what it’s worth, Celia Barlow, MP for Hove, has excellent pesteredness points. I made it all the way up to Sedgefield and defeated Tony Blair in battle. My prize was the source code of the adventure game in Python.

Ah, what larks!

There’s another project that Matthew works on that I find extremely useful. He has created accessible UK train timetables using the data from the National Rail site, a scrAPI if you will. This is where I go whenever I need to plan a train journey.

The latest feature is something that warms the cockles of my heart: beautiful, hackable URLs. If I want a list of trains going from Brighton to London, I can just type:

http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london

It handles spaces (or pluses or underscores) too:

http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london victoria

The URL can also be extended with a departure time:

http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london victoria/14:00

My address bar is my command line. This is the kind of design that makes URL fetishists like Tom very happy.