That’s it. I give up. The comment spammers have won, and I have turned off comments entirely. Fifteen friggin’ years, and I give up. If you want to comment on something here, send me an email or a tweet.

SEO comment spammers – you can go to hell.

Yesterday I led a wireframing workshop at the TiE Sydney Create-a-thon. It was a weekend-long event for women who are interested in founding their own mobile-related start-up. All of the attendees had ideas for an app or a project, but most didn’t have any sort of technical background. There were talks on starting a business, getting investments, navigating the mobile app ecosystem, the whole shebang. There were some developers and designers there as well to help the women start refining and prototyping their ideas. I was asked to step in as a last minute replacement for the person leading the wireframing workshop, and I ended up working late into the night Friday to get ready. It went really well though! My goal was to persuade everyone of the importance of wireframing their ideas (rather than jumping straight into design or code) and to give them some tips and techniques to do it. (It helped that I had done a lightning talk on the topic at Girl Geeks a few years ago and made a zillion wireframes myself as a B.A.) My slides are here if you’re interested:

The talk was really well received! At the end I handed out 150+ printed iPhone wireframing templates and ran a brainstorming exercise with the teams. I was really gratified to see that the act of sketching was already helping them to refine and explore their app ideas. Then it was lunchtime, and I had a great time talking with the attendees and answering their questions. I was also thrilled to meet Kasia Gospos from Leaders in Heels, as I’d actually backed her crowdfunded “Make Your Mark” notebook last year! I’m so excited to see what projects end up coming out of Create-a-thon. Many thanks to TiE Director Ambika for inviting me!