John Boykin teaches us to recognize the seven most common sources of confusion and how to avoid them. Using case studies, John dissects each pattern, proposes a redesign to reduce confusion, and offers guidelines for making your website more intuitive.

@font-face in CSS creates new possibilities for web typography but there are technical and legal hurdles. Ryan Carver describes Typekit, a service addressing the problems with a centralized, updateable font-serving platform and web-savvy licensing model.

John Allspaw often sees stability and productivity benefits from deploying small code changes more frequently. This talk describes how to determine the right balance for your environment, as well as how effective your current operational processes are.

Making truly awesome stuff is hard. Pivot Carl Coryell-Martin proposes we identify common physiological responses and condense their design solutions into a pattern language. He presents a draft set of patterns in the context of crafting an iPhone app.

David Pollak maintains Lift, a Rails-like app framework for Scala. In this talk, he and Martin Odersky, author of Scala, live-code a 30-line, real-time, web-based chat application and discuss the Scala constructs that allow for such concise apps.

Isaac Hall of Recurly.com describes many of the hidden challenges in managing recurring billing online. He offers step-by-step tips, tricks, and firsthand experience on how to better architect and more easily deploy billing in your application.

Pivot Davis W. Frank presents Pivotal’s experience writing apps for Palm’s webOS. Including a live test-driven coding exercise, Davis covers agile development practices, our testing framework Pockets, and good development patterns.

Pivot David Stevenson introduces RSpec tools Remarkable and Contextually. Remarkable makes testing ActiveRecord and ActionController more declarative. Contextually simplifies testing the behavior of controllers against a variety of roles.

MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Mike Dirolf of 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, will discuss the features that make it an interesting choice as a datastore for web applications. He will give examples of how to interact with MongoDB from Ruby and discuss how MongoDB’s auto-sharding allows it to provide infinite scalability.

Jon Dahl ponders the big questions. What can programmers learn from the thought of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill? More than you might think. He links philosophical ethics and ideas to the processes, tools, and methodologies of software development as we discuss a critical question: is successful development primarily a matter of finding the right rules, creating the right outcomes, or cultivating the right virtues?