Montreal Tech Watch

The First Web Dev Book Club was held at Laïka yesterday, at 7pm. Evan has a write-up, and I took some notes too from the meetup:

• Jean-François Couture who has a software engineering background, talked about In search Of Stupidity, by Merril C. Chapman. It has stories of “stupid” marketing moves done in the hi-tech industry in its early days. For instance, there was WordStar, which invented word processing, but was erased from the market after a series of management decisions. We talked afterwards about tech industry leaders in the 80’s who went through the same ordeal. Evan Prodromou started a discussion wether there is something specific with the software industry, and if we can learn from the past. I said that the industry is moving so fast, getting in new markets, with new social usage, that there is really not much we can get from the past. This is a topic that should be further discussed.
• Evan Prodromou read Everything is miscellaneous by Dave Weinberger, which is on the topic of information and how you can handle data. Evan was especially interested in free tagging and RDF, which he uses for wikitravel to present and organize data. The book also covers the decimal system, used in public libraries worldwide, which can be extended easily to handle additional books.
• I had the book Information Architecture. This was a hard book to digest, and I think my presentation was not as good as Evan’s or the one done by Jean-Francois. Still, I think IA is an important subject, and will be even more so in the upcoming years. I wanted to get this book first, because I have started using services like Twitter, RSS readers, IM and many other services in the internet and it made me think about information overload, and especially the best way to present information in a meaningful and complete way. The book is very scholar, and presents a framework to use IA in your web projects. It’s also complete, with detailed steps and tools. A recommended read for me, although I am more on the agile/get real methodologies.

The books were good, but what I found best was the discusssions, which were very insightful. We arranged the next Web Dev Book Club meetup to be held on the last monday of every month. That means the next one is due July 30th, at 7pm, at Laïka.

If you have a book to present, please add it to the wiki with the book’s title, or make a post with the tag WebDevMontreal. There should be at most 4 books in the next meetup, and it should last 1 hour and a half.

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