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When I first came on staff as a User Experience Designer at Planet Argon, one of my very first projects was to take our responsive site, Brainstormr and bring it into the mobile world by building an iPhone application for it. My experience designing Brainstormr was the first time I had gotten an opportunity to do a Mobile Application design and I jumped at the opportunity. There was a lot of research and learning involved, but it was totally worth it, and now i am proud to say my first application design came out a success. Here are a few things I learned along the way.

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We've launched a native iOS app that everyone can collaborate on or offline, export ideas to Evernote, collect ideas from their social networks and keep up with their Brainstormr lists on-the-go.

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Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned while being at Planet Argon has been the value of learning on the job. As a design student, there is freedom to create something that is largely for your own visual tastes. But in a professional environment, the world changes when there’s a client and an approval process.

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We released an iPhone application to compliment our web application, Brainstormr.

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It had been about 6 or 7 years since I went to my last Webvisions Conference in Portland, so I was really excited to go this year since the web has evolved and really changed a lot since then. Planet Argon bought me a pass for Thursday and Friday, and I heard lots of great talks over the two days. Some were on The Agile and Lean UX Methods and working well with your team, some were on how to explain things better and how to develop a curiosity that will take you through your whole career. More technical talks were about things like video on the web, API’s, or building dynamic prototypes.

Among all these different topics and speakers, I had one consistency that helped me retain all the information better (and probably communicate it better to other people on the web too).
It was by taking what I have learned at the conference and sketch-noting the talks.

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RailsConf 2013 was held in our hometown of Portland, Oregon. Most of us had been to RailsConf at least once before, though it had been a few years. The Rails ecosystem has really matured since then, and maintainability and APIs dominated many of the talks instead of social networks and new toolkits. There were many good talks and speakers, but a few truly exceptional ones that we really enjoyed. So we each selected our favorites and suggest anyone that couldn’t go this year should check these out online at Confreaks They should be posted shortly.

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Once upon a time, I found myself struggling with a few business ideas and problems. How do I win more project bids? How do I find new clients? Should I get a new full-time job and drop this “Planet Argon” thing? How can I improve my coding? Am I… Should I… etc.

Taking advice from friends, I reached out to a few people that I admired in the industry. I offered to take them lunch in exchange for their time to bounce a few ideas and questions off of.

Out of the, roughly, ten people that I wrote, a few people said they were busy and said, “maybe in a few months when things are less hectic.” One person agreed to meet the following week. We met up during lunch, had some food… and I got some great feedback on my ideas and questions. When the bill was put down on the table, they said, “My treat. You’re a young entrepreneur, you shouldn’t be spending your money on people like me… yet.”

That was ten years ago.

Admittedly, over the past few years… I have had a number of people send me similar introduction emails. I, like the folks who replied to me, have found myself being too busy to schedule lunch with them… but last week… one person caught my attention with their introduction. It stood out from the usual copy/paste “help me!” email… and I ended up accepting their invitation¹, but only under the condition that they let me buy them lunch.

They have better things to spend their money on right now.

Having said that, I would like to put out a formal offer to the people in the Portland area. If you are a motivated and young (say under 30?²) entrepreneur who wants to bounce some ideas and/or questions off of someone who has been running an agency for nearly 11 years… then I invite you to introduce yourself to me, pitch the topics you’d like to cover, and I’ll schedule and buy lunch for you³.

I owe you that much.

¹ ProTip: Finding out something unique about the person you’re writing by a simple google search will go a long way to not getting filtered. In this case, they said they enjoyed my old band’s music… flattery works. ;-)
² Give or take… I’m targeting the twenty-somethings because I might be able to better explain how I got by on paying myself a lot less when my personal expenses were lower. (not that you can’t keep expenses down when you get older… but you get the idea)
³ Limited to five people.

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So, I didn’t technically attend Google I/O 2013, this year’s iteration of the company’s developer conference; I didn’t receive a free Chromebook Pixel and I definitely didn’t sit through the 3.5-hour keynote. But I did watch a bunch of the session videos when I was likely supposed to be doing something else, like laundry or, you know, working. There were hundreds of talks over the course of the 3 days, with topics including Android, Chrome & Apps, Maps, and YouTube, and the majority of them are posted on the Google Developers YouTube channel. In comparison to last year’s flashy introductions (Google Glass, a new Android OS, the Nexus 7 tablet), the 2013 I/O was less relevant to the typical consumer. But I found this year’s focus on developers and their tools quite interesting; in particular, there were a few announcements that really caught my attention.

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While in PDX for RailsConf 2013, if you find yourself wanting to checkout gamer havens this article has you covered.

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Last week, Brian and I sat with our peers in rapt attention at the Seattle occurrence of An Event Apart, the inspiring one-track web conference started by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer in 2005. Known as “the design conference for people who make websites,” AEA is a particularly acclaimed web conference for good reason. Zeldman and Meyer, visionaries famous for helping shape the web as we know it, gather a dozen of the web’s most influential creators and gifted presenters to share their thoughts, inquiries, and discoveries with the several hundred fortunate attendees.

Since you were too busy vacuuming and/or getting your tires rotated to attend, I’ve summarized the best parts. Enjoy!

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