I went to this year’s

I went to this year’s PHP conference in London at the Business Design Centre. Approximately 450 people attended from various backgrounds – Developers, consultants and team managers. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft WebsiteSpark, PayPal X developer network and Facebook. Other companies that attended included ibuildings, TEK systems, O’Reilly’s amongst others.

All together there were 16 talks. The speakers list included Johannes Schluter release manager for the PHP 5.3 series, Josh Holmes of Microsoft and Stephan Koopmanschap who’s worked on PHPBB and the Zend Framework.

Below is a brief summary of three talks. I won’t go into any detail but just highlight some concepts leaving you to delve deeper should you wish.

The list below is literally a few points that I took from the each of the talks that I thought were interesting. All the ideas are related to the title of each lecture.

Keynote talk
Josh Holmes
The lost art of simplicity
Recommended book: The inmates are running the asylum.

• Don’t be a victim of “The truck factor”. Truck factor: if the writer of the code gets hit by a truck you’ve lost the solution!
• Find technologies that “solve the problem for you”. Don’t do everything yourself.
• Don’t use the latest, greatest, shiniest tool just because everybody else does, it has to fit your project’s needs. Do you have the right tools for the job?
• Understand the rules, the fundamentals, know what’s happening “under the hood”. Study the essentials of programming regardless of the technology you’re using.
• A good way to test simplicity is to explain your solution to a non technical person, do they understand it easily?
• Let your users dictate what your next feature should be rather than predicting the future, keep ‘might be’ in the back of your head. Get the fundamentals done and launch.
• How many users do you see, talk to or even sit next to you during development? How well do you know a group of your users, what’s natural to you may not be natural to them.
• Don’t make technical decisions based on political or religious issues, i.e. ‘I want to do something to spite so and so’ or ‘I’m a believer in X so we should use it no matter what’.

Last week I visited “Decode – Digital design sensations”, at the

Last week I visited “Decode – Digital design sensations”, at the V&A in London. Decode showcases the latest developments in digital interactive design, and focused on three themes. Coding, which explored how computer code can be used to create great pieces of conceptual design; interactivity, that looked at work that responded to physical presence, and Network charts or reworks that visualizes stats from its surroundings.

The exhibits were all very conceptual in their approach and they all tried to interact with their surroundings or people in different ways, and this is why I think it was such a great show and why everyone there was enjoying it. Families were creating 3 second video spots for the video grid by Ross Philips, Children were throwing their arms and legs about in front of a canvas to create their own art on Mehmet Aktens Body paint. There were even some of the more senior visitors looking slightly nervous about the amount of data traces that can be pulled from the real world.

There were a couple of pieces of work that really stood out for me. Daniel Rozin’s Weave Mirror. Since seeing this I’ve had a quick look at other work by Rozin and there’s a couple of other great pieces, the mirror’s mirror and the snow mirror are worth a look if you haven’t already seen them, both are his website.

Another piece of work that I was really impressed with was Simon Heijdens “Tree” just because of how simple but great the idea was, plus it had the benefit of looking brilliant. The digital tree reacted to the weather conditions outside, so would blow in the wind. The tree would also shed its leaves which were projected onto the floor and then the users could kick through.

The show was great, I enjoyed reading about all the different projects at the exhibition and seeing how digital design is slowly but strongly expanding from screens and into the physical world. It was also refreshing to see that this wasn’t another geeky digital exhibition, its audience was wide spread the world was being enjoyed by everyone. If you get chance I would recommend you get yourself there, but be quick it’s only on till the 11th of April.

Here are the rest of the photos from my trip to Decode, on our Flickr account.

It’s that time of the year again, when the men of Jupiter down their razors in the name of charity.]]>

It’s that time of the year again, when the men of Jupiter down their razors in the name of charity. Yes folks, Beard Off is back for 2009.

Jupiter’s reigning Beard Off champion and senior designer Paddy Leverton has chosen the Alzheimer’s Research Trust as this year’s worthy cause. And in a change from last year, beards will be grown for three weeks rather than two, starting from Friday 20th February. Then, after three weeks are up, our surviving contestants will be asked to sculpt their beards into award-winning styles on Friday 13th March.

Our very own expert panel of judges – Kelli, India and Becky – will therefore not only be considering quantity, but also finesse. They’ll select a final three contestants, who’ll then face the Jupiter company vote for the crown of Beard Off champion 2009. This means even the less hairy Jupiterites among us have a chance of winning the coveted prize if they manage to create something beautiful, resulting in the most open Beard Off since records began.

Stay tuned for regular updates on this year’s titanic battle for glory right here. We’ll be hoping for as many donations as possible for our chosen charity, so please dig deep and show your support for our champs as they battle against the odds to go unshaven for three weeks. It’s going to be tashtastic…

ITV Central News have been really supportive of the exhibition and calendar launch for

ITV Central News have been really supportive of the exhibition and calendar launch for ORBS (oncoplastic reconstructive breast surgery).

They came to two of the photo shoots and did some behind the scenes filming and then joined us at the official launch to capture the countdown and the official launch itself.

The women featured in the calendar were nervous and excited about seeing their shots for the very first time and handled the world of live TV like pros!

A big thank you to Chrissie and the crew who were genuinely interested in what we were doing and made the filming experience a breeze.