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2 August 2007

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Symphony 2: Development Goals

This show is about a boy (Allen) who learns true magic (Symphony 2) and the challenges he and his friends faced against 3 evil entities: Bloat, Inefficiency and Learning Curve.

Allen talks about the challenges the team faced with the current state of Symphony and the solutions they’ve implemented for version 2; presented in a format known to the academics as “lectures I rather skip”. Be warned, attendance will be marked against your final grade. Get the keynote presentation now or forever hold your peace with a B+ at best.

Why?

Some of you might be wondering about the rise in podcasts and screencasts of late, whilst tutorial articles have taken the back-seat for now. As you can tell, the production quality and vocal demeanour of my podcasts and screencasts have been improving gradually. Soon I will be good enough to conquer the world of television, acting amongst the likes of Lauren Graham and Evangeline Lilly. I am dead serious.

Okay, not really

All kidding aside, here are the real reasons:

  1. Primer - it’s important to introduce the concepts in Symphony 2 as they are different and an improvement over past versions.
  2. Heads-up - in the lead-up to the release of Symphony 2, developers needn’t be surprised by the changes by asserting that these changes are for the better.
  3. Aggregation - we want to build up that knowledge-base that Symphony is oh-so-lacking. This will be one of many knowledge inducing presentations to come (they won’t necessarily be in a keynote format).

Discussion

Did the boy eventually defeat the 3 evil entities? Did you find too many plot-holes? Perhaps you would prefer an alternate ending? Let us know if you think this will be a box-office hit.

Comment Details

  • 5 Comments
  • 1 wordfest participant

Almost-guaranteed discussion of intrigue

Brian Zerangue 2 August 07

Allen - This is awesome! Thanks for sharing this. I’m looking forward in great anticipation to try this out. I know S2 will be amazing! Please thanks the whole team for their amazing work!!!

Dru 2 August 07

Thanks for this Allen, very informative :) I love the focus you’ve put on workflow and improving it as that’s been one of the areas I’ve found symphony lacking in a bit when it comes to making more complex sites. Can’t wait for 2.0, you guys are doing sterling work.

Jiri 2 August 07

Bravo Team! This made it very clear how 2.0 will shine! And how an intelligent(thinking different), closed, small design-rooted dev team can achieve insanely great things, given (much) time…

Damien 3 August 07Wordfest participantWordfest character limit award

Can’t wait for S2 to make it’s celebrity appearance.

In my own humble opinion, the learning curve should take a backseat to making S2 more efficient and slimmed down—which are a few reasons I love Symphony. Some poeple complain about XML/XSLT contributing to the learning curve, but I doubt that will remain the case once the technologies start becoming more and more commonplace (especially since XML seems to be getting very popular in web apps nowadays).

Trevor Meier 10 October 07

Thanks for posting this info… however, I would much prefer to have this written in a post. I found the screencast hard to listen to (lots of ums and aws), and it forces me to spend 20 minutes listening for information I could read in 3 or 4.

Thanks for all your work!

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