Montreal Tech Watch

The Web Development Book Club was this Monday, and it was great. Perfect time for a fresh beer and discuss what’s up in Montreal. I’ll cut to the books first, and will write more notes about the meetup at the end of the post

• I finished reading last month Agile web development with Rails, 2nd edition. My biggest concern was that I bought the book because the first word was “Agile”, but it was in fact a book about the Ruby on Rails framework. The book presents the core basics, then has a 100 pages about building your first Rails application, and goes on with more advanced chapters on Rails and Ruby. It’s quite complete. I talked how it’s quite hypocritical of the authors to write how hard it is to deploy your rails app, only at the last chapters of the book. Still, it’s a good read if you want to learn about Ruby on Rails and save time, without trying to find endlessly tutorials on the Internet.
• Patrick Tanguay, who works in design, HTML, CSS and web standards, read Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction design. Brendan Dawes is a designer Patrick saw at this year’s South by South West, and he is the kind of designer who experiments a lot. He writes that ADD is ok and you should try new designs and new concepts, as long as you are learning along the way. The book is very visual, filled with screenshots and pictures. He created for instance a web user interface that ages (instead of being the same all the time, for every user). I am not sure I would get this on my shelf, although I would gladly browse through it on my free time.
• JF Couture who works with RoR, presented Defensive Design for the web, by 37Signals. It’s a list of user interface tips and guidelines on how you can improve the user experience, such as crafting your 404 pages, error alerts, form pages … mostly for ecommerce websites. I think the keyword is crafting, as 37Signals is well-known to be obsessive on small details on icons and illustrations, pixel-precise designs, and copy smithing. The book was published in 2004, and focused on ecommerce websites like amazon.com, but I think it’s quite relevant to your typical social networking or web2.0 service you are currently developing.
• Mat, who used to work with Jean-Francois, read Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to technology. The book is by Neil Postman, and says we are now heavily dependent on technology, which rules every part of our world, that we apply numbers and mathematical formulas to life, even though it really doesn’t make sense. What can I say … Jean-Francois said the book was (too) philosophical, I said that technology is a tool and cannot be considered as “immoral” in itself, and the judge is based upon its usage only. There is a well-known saying in French “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme”, by the philosopher Rabelais 5 centuries ago and I think it sums up well the problem.

As a final note, I think the greatest part was the discussions. There was a lenghty discussion at the beginning about the 4 hour work week, about hugh mac leod, about developers working across the globe, freelancing in Montreal. JF’s book also sparked a talk about how to work with clients/managers and tell them you need twice more time to work on a few “words” and make a great user interface.

The next web dev book club is planned as usual the last monday of each month, which makes it 27th of August, 7pm, at Laika, 4040 bvd St-Laurent