After dragging ourselves out of the hotel room (it seems that Austin has some sort of mystical property that makes you super-tired in the morning. Combine that with the time zone change = 2 grumpy coders. 2 grumpy coders + Starbucks in the convention center = :) ).
After getting some caffeine we hit the doors running and made it to the best panel of the day: Why We Should Ignore Users. Cutting through all of the analogies and acronyms the session mostly focused on ACD, err I mean Activity-Centered Design and User-Centered Design. Robert Hoekman Jr., arguably one of the best designers in the industry, provided some strong points for going with ACD. My personal opinions on it is that ACD is the way to go, it gives the team a rallying point and a solid filter to avoid creep and other project killers. A side note I definitely recommend reading Hoekman's book: Designing the Obvious - you will not be disappointed.
Shortly after I hit an unexpected jewel of a panel: Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun? Serious games can be defined as any game that provides any type of educational benefit beyond the basic entertainment value. The little goodie that came from this panel wasn't seeing them play cool games, or talk about the business side of educational games, but rather hearing them share their point of views on what happens when you involve users and the community in the software development process. The real focus of the panel ended up being how to engage your users and keep them engaged.
We then hit: ValleySpeak for the Rest of Us: Developing Apps Outside InternetVille. Pretty good stuff - the panel consisted of Dan Cederholm and Brian Oberkirch. No real hot points - it seemed that they were just trying to point out the fact that really good software can be developed outside of Silicon Valley. Right now one place comes to mind: Irving, Texas.
Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design capped off our day. They began talking about the 3 aspects of web design -- Data (HTML), Style (CSS), and Behavior (JavaScript) -- but later jumped into team interaction and development / design as they have experienced it...
All and all a pretty good day... more to come