SXSW Day 03: SUNday Funday

Sunday started out raining but it ended up being a SUNdat fun day. Yeah, puns all over the place. I ran throug some sessions, got some grub and schwag, and shook hands with a real cool. All while it from cold and rainy to warm and sunny. It was like the sun energized the whole crowd. Let’s look at the talks:

The Fast HMTL5 talk at the Radission was a great overview of all things JavaScript for great development. He was also the guy that did the SXSW Interactive Shuttle website, which does real time tracking ofthe shuttle. He talked about some programming methodoles like MVC for JavaScript and how to work with. He also gave a high level over view of HTML5. A nice little round up of best practices.

Continuing on the trend I then headed over to the ACC and caught the CSS optimizaiton talk. The guy was from Mozilla and he helped walk through how the gecko browser rendered the DOM and specifically CSS. He then talked about when redraw events happen and what strategies to do to avoid redraw. The take away from this talk was that the nightly build of Firefox has a debug toggle to flash the screen whenever CSS is redrawn.

I opted for a change for a change of pace next and caught up with Spencer Hall from Everyday Should Be Saturday, a college football blog. His focus was on developing memes and new ways to cover sports versus the old world way. I got some great idead for KC College GameDay and also got chuckle on him jamming Ron Prince and Craig James.

I went with a buddy of mine next to see the API is Your Business talk. This was a fairly huge bust. I walked in already believing that and really didn’t want to see everyone on the panel either defend or cheerlead that idea. I was looking for strategies and best practices. Oh well, we bailed early and enjoyed the sun some more.

Finally, the last talk of the day saw me hit up my favorite SXSW speaker, Paul Lemere from EchoNest, and his talk Data Mining Music. It was essentially about half of what he talked about last yearh, but he also blew through about 10 demoes showcasing EchoNest’s APIs and work. Multiple oohs and ahhs on top of applause all around the talk. I get soe energized after coming out of his panel and I’m anxious to get started on some his work, especially the Remix API.

As for the non talk events, as soon as the sun came out, the action was all over the street. I knocked out picking up my new Moo cards and got a whole bunch of schwag. The parties in the evening also came through. The Interactive + Film fusion party was at the Stage on 6th and featured free food and drink. The country music started so we bounced to the Parish.

The PBS Sherlock Party totally came through for us. Stephen Moffitt of Doctor Who and Sherlock fame was there to promote Sherlock season 2. After waiting in line for 2 hours and got to meet him. I asked if the Time Meddler will come back he said it’s very low on the list, ha! Well, he didn’t really know who the Time Meddler was. At any rate the line wrapped around the bar so we weren’t jonesing for anything. That was the day and now I’m getting ready for day 4!