Caffeine Dependency Injection

The MIX11 conference coming up in April has posted the top user-submitted session abstracts and posted them up to the site. Entries were up a whopping 228% this year – a total of 384 entries!  Just over 200 of these have been selected into the pool of Open Call entries and it’s now open for voting.

My session proposal, “Design as a Differentiator – 10 Design Tips for Developers” was one of the selected entries.  I’m excited about the opportunity to present at MIX – now I just need you to vote! I appreciate your support.

Vote at: http://live.visitmix.com/OpenCall/Vote/Session/40

You would think that with over 200 listed sessions, there would be a clear separation of excellent and mediocre entries.  The truth is, the vast majority of the session proposals sound fantastic.  It’s a clear indicator that this will be yet another amazing year at MIX.  Regardless of whether I get to present, I’m amazed at the quality of all of the proposals, and it makes me even more excited for 72 hours of talking with passionate developers, designers, and UXperts!

It did, however, make it that much more difficult to decide where to allocate my ten votes.  Here’s what I ended up voting on:

• Good C# Habits can Encourage Bad JavaScript Habits by Elijah Manor – Elijah is a JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC guru and also posts a huge list of daily “Tech Tweets.” He presented a fantastic session at MIX10 titled “Six Things Every jQuery Developer Must Know.”
• Natural User Interfaces, Today and Tomorrow – An Interactive Discussion and Demonstration by Microsoft Surface MVPs – NUI sessions are just plain fun and exciting.  Josh Blake‘s session at MIX10 where he presented NaturalShow was very cool, and this session with the Surface MVPs promises to be just as fun.
• Ensuring a Consistent UX for Enterprise Software: Merging a Pattern Library with Silverlight Styles and Custom Controls by Kevin Silver – Such an important topic that is ignored by so many large enterprise organizations.  From the abstract, it sounds like Kevin has a lot to share.
• Intro to Building Apps with Twilio by John Sheehan – Twilio is something I’ve been wanting to explorer for a while, and this interactive session from the creator of RestSharp definitely sounds like a fun way to check it out.
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Websites by Rajesh Lal – Interested to see what Rajesh has in his list of habits, especially to see if there’s anything I miss myself.
• Building an ASP.NET MVC 3 Mobile Application by Malcolm Sheridan – Malcolm posts a ton of useful articles to the web, and since I’m someone who spends a ton of time building ASP.NET MVC applications, I’m interested in seeing him present this.
• Enhancing User Experiences with Reactive Extensions by Bryan Anderson – Reactive Extensions has a lot to offer the user experience realm, and Bryan’s session proposal sounds like a great way to show off some of the cool things it can do.
• Introducing Windows Phone 7 to iPhone and Android Developers by Kevin Hoffman – Kevin is a friend and colleague of mine who is working on a book introducing WP7 development to iPhone developers.  He has some fun ways of helping iOS devs make the transition.
• Exploiting Expression Blend: XAML Without Tears by Andrew Troelsen – First of all, “XAML Without Tears” is simply a fantastic session title.  Blend is a technology that I need to dive into at some point, and this sounds like a great way to do it.
• Building Accessible Websites by Greg Galipeau – An important issue that so many of us ignore.  Looking forward to this one for sure.

So many others that I wanted to vote for, but these are my top 10.  And if you have 10 seconds to spare, and can identify a cat, vote for me! http://live.visitmix.com/OpenCall/Vote/Session/40