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The day began for me by getting up before 8am. Now, for you hardcore types, getting up that early on a saturday is okay but for me it’s plain sacrilegious. Especially if you stayed up till 1am working on some last minute coding.

Why get up that early for SxSW 2006? Because I moderated a panel at 10 am this morning called “Looking for XML in all the Wrong Places.” My fellow panelists were Giusseppe Ferrigno of Hart InterCivic, Simon St. Laurent of O’Reilly, and Jen Linton of ComTech Services. We basically had a good time up there, talking about all the horrible things that can happen to you if you’re not careful with XML. (As soon as I know where the podcast is, I’ll link to it.)

After the panel, Hope and I grabbed a quick lunch at Liberty Tavern in the Hilton across the street, then spent a profitable hour listening to Jim Coudal and Jason Fried (of 37Signals) talk about less is more. Less money is good, because you don’t waste it. Less time to code is better because then you concentrate on key aspects of the project and less time writing specs that no one will read anyway. Less complexity means building what customers want instead of “death-by-software” projects that aren’t sustainable or supportable. The entire thing made me clap wildly and cheer–it was good to get so much validation on our approach to building TopDog, Lander, and Dingo.

(By the way, SxSW 2006 is when we are launching Dingo. What’s Dingo, you ask? Well, have you ever been in a position where you’re an expert at X but you need to know Y (something similar) to complete a project? Dingo helps you make that leap for programming languages. We are offering it free to the open source community–we’re hoping that we get a bunch of folks come out, register for FREE and help us build a kick-ass knowledge repository that will help us all grow our knowledge.)

Anyway, I ran into a bunch of Django folks after the talk and I spent a profitable half-hour chatting about Python vs. PHP, web frameworks, and directions that Web 2.0 is taking the community. All in all, a good day.

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