Day 3 of South by Southwest Interactive was a huge improvement over Day 2. Perhaps we just did a better job picking talks/panels, but we left each feeling like we learned something useful.
Started the morning at “Beyond LAMP: Scaling Websites Past MySQL”. Panelists included Christopher Slowe of Reddit, Serkan Piantino of Facebook, and Kevin Weil of Twitter. It was interesting to see their respective speed optimization strategies. Notes here.
Next we headed to “Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play” with Andy Baio of Kickstarter.com. This guy was an awesome presenter: funny, engaging, and informative. Basically he discussed how principles of game play can be used to help solve real-world problems. I can see these ideas being used to take our test prep and brain health apps to the next level.
Lastly, we sat in on a great talk titled “Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users to Do What You Want Them To” with Andy Budd of ClearLeft. His principles seem like common sense after you hear them, but it’s amazing how pervasively they’re used by marketers and designers.
If you want to see what we’re up to at SXSW, check out our Twitter feed - we’ll be updating it live.
