meshU schedule

I’m a big fan of meshU. I was lucky enough to speak last year. Mike McDerment has announce the initial meshU schedule today. Perhaps a little Rails focused on the development side (AideRSS, Unspace and Engine Yard – even 37signals on the design side), this might be a result of FreshBooks using Rails for part of their infrastructure. I hope that Michael and the team will consider expanding the technologies to include things like PHP and Drupal, jQuery, other MVC frameworks, other mobile & rich client development environments, configuring your development environment.

The initial schedule looks great for designers and developers. It’s hands-on practical exposure to leading Web 2.0 technologies, techniques and patterns. meshU is a bargain, it’s $289 to attend ($25 for a limited number of student tickets). It fits right into a similar spot that TechDays filled for developers on the Microsoft stack. Way less expensive than Mix, PDC or Web2Expo particularly when you remove the travel costs. I love seeing world-class talent and conversation happening in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver (yes, I know that meshU is only in Toronto – for now).

Design

• Ryan Singer, 37signals – Value Judgements in Interface Design
• Bruce Philp, GWP Brand Engineering – Ten Keys to a Branded User Experience

Development

• Chris Wanstrath, GitHub – Building a Business with Open Source
• Ilya Grigorik, AideRSS – Event-Driven Architectures
• Pete Forde, Unspace – Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
• Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Engine Yard – Building Scalable/Decoupled Web Architecture

Management

• Dominic Bortolussi, The Working Group – Experiments on selling agile development projects. Are Estimates the new ‘Spec’?