An an unwelcome, ill-timed fire alarm at my Hotel this morning, caused me to miss the first session at the conference today. If I’d pushed myself I could have got there a little bit late and snuck in, but I decided to take my time.

Exciting view from the balcony of my room in Toronto

So my first session was ‘Professionally Pushing Pixels’ by Ralph Hauwert. It was another fantastic talk. He wove a story that dipped into his influences as a kid ( ninjas, robots and the Commodore 64 ) and connected dots from them to projects in the present. The culmination was a high speed flight though 3D graphics theory played out on Flash 10.

I learned loads. I’m not sure that I’m ready to immerse myself in 3D yet, since to be honest I have challenges in 2D, but I’m so glad to understand more about how shading works, and to be able to compare rendering in voxels with triangles.

Ralph demonstrated some of the next generation of PaperVision 3D that he contributes to. Great talker – very good story teller and inspirational developer. Catch him if you can.

Following that I attended a talk called ‘Online, the brand is you’ presented by Carole Guevin from NetDiver. This presentation was all about developing an online portfolio and interested me for a few reasons.

When I ‘left’ Nortel last year I suddenly realized that my career’s work was stashed away in networks around the world.  A lot of my work is embedded in boxes, but quite a bit of my work was graphically based, and I wished that I had a way of showcasing it all.

Leaving Nortel prompted me in some ways to invest more of my time in personal projects. I’ve been working hard on a big project that lives in the cloud and ( I think ) pushes a few boundaries with cloud APIs. I want to showcase that project, and have a list of ideas for other experiments and utilities that I’ll set up soon.

In the end Carole’s talk was more about the psychology of ‘you being the brand’, than the actual presentation of the portfolio ( which was the reason I’d attended ). I loved her talk. It was real dose of wisdom and useful as advice for anyone even writing a resume, identifying personal values or setting goals for the future. I have lots of notes written down but I’ve linked her PDF document for those interested.

I hope to set up my portfolio and ‘lab’ experiments page in the coming months and will certainly use Carole’s advice.

After a break for lunch, I attended ‘Cool Shit!’ a toy show type presentation where a few ‘Rock Star’ presenters showed some of their latest work and experiments. I’ve linked a few things to check out below. Very cool.

• Sourcebinder
• More from Quasimondo
• Koen De Weggheleire

Introducing… The Enraptured Cranberry Jellyfish from Tokyo from dr woohoo on Vimeo

Finally I joined in ‘Things every ActionScript developer should know’ by Grant Skinner, which was packed with people. I concurred with a lot of the content of his presentation, which again was more about the psychology of developing software and would be equally as applicable to any programming language or platform.

I especially related to what he was saying about programming being like an artform. I know that it could easily sound pretentious, but part of the ‘simplicity’ that I was looking for in my work post Nortel was to be able to immerse myself more in software development for a while. To re-connect with algorithms, structures and symmetry of coding – to try and connect my past with the present some more ( I’ve been coding since I was 11 and although a lot has changed, much of the early theory I learned has a place in developing today ).

The FITC conference doesn’t end until late tomorrow night, but I’m typing up these notes on the train back to Ottawa at the end of the second ‘proper’ day. I didn’t know what to expect ( as I mentioned yesterday ) and only budgeted enough time and money for a couple of days.

It was a worthwhile experience for sure – incredibly high quality of presentations and organization ( I didn’t make it to the parties and after show events and am a bit sad that I didn’t ). Lots of energy and inspiration. I’m certainly coming home buzzing with ideas for projects and research – mainly in the context of browser graphics. I made a couple of new connections with people there too.

Well done FITC organizers and presenters! Thanks.