Simon Willison’s Weblog

Choice SxSW quotes

18th March 2005

My American adventure is ongoing; I’m still in Austin at the moment, but I’ll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there’s a small chance I’ll get there via Dallas. This doesn’t leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome—if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.

I met a lot of new people this year as well. Since David Nunez had pointed out that “what do you do?” was a bit of a dull opening question (not to mention a conversation killer for people who dislike their job) I stuck with “So what are you excited about?” instead. It worked pretty well—I got a whole bunch of great answers, with the most random probably coming from the guy who was excited about mopeds (it turned out he runs the world’s number one moped site).

The most entertaining panel by far was the Home Star Runner one, in which the Brothers Chaps finally revealed the secret to their animation success: motion capture! I’ll have to post a few pictures once I get back on a high speed ’net connection; suffice to say the constant laughter from the room was heard throughout the convention center.

Anyway, on to the quotes. The first two are from Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

PHP is like a beautiful woman... with syphilis

Maintaining badly written code is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle set by someone who can’t spell

I also like this one from Jeremy Dunck, who was justifying sharing your ideas with people at the conference despite the risk of other people implementing them first:

It’s like the lazyweb in meatspace

The credit for the last one goes (I think) to Yvonne Adams, who made the sage observation that:

South by South West is spring break for web geeks

It certainly is. See you all again next year!