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Code ’14 Wrapup

The Web, and what we can do with it has come a long way since the first conference we were involved with back in 2004. Each event we do represents a sort of milestone, and hopefully reflects the sorts of challenges, opportunities and concerns we face as we design and develop for the Web. That’s certainly the aim as we put each program together.

In 2004, Web Essentials (that’s what the event was called back then) featured no JavaScript. The term “Ajax”, had not been invented, jQuery was still more than a year away from public release, Firefox was still in beta.

And 10 years later? Well, the program for Web Directions Code, which took place last week in Melbourne hopefully captures a lot of that. JavaScript as an increasingly high performance, sophisticated modern language. Device APIs that allow us to create ever more sophisticated experiences on all kinds of devices barely dreamt of in 2004, including Robots.

If you were there, you’ll hopefully agree with us it was inspiring, exciting, challenging, and highly educational. If you weren’t, well, the next best thing are the slides and other resources available online that we’ll list below, and the upcoming videos (to hear about them, first, why not sign up to our low noise, high signal, once a week mail out of all things awesome about the Web)

Slides and other resources from Web Directions Code 2014

Raquel Vélez‘s You Can Do What With Math Now? was an awesomely inspirational start to the show, looking at what we can do with JavaScript, Mathematics, canvas and robots.

Ryan Seddon showed us how Web Components are the Future of Web Development.

Fiona Chan took us on a 15 minute deep dive into The Declarative Power of CSS Selectors.

Rob Manson of BuildAR let us in on The Easy Way to Create Augmented Web Experiences.

Andrew Fisher took us on a Device API Safari. You can check out the code from his examples here.

Allen Wirfs-Brock showed how ECMAScript 6 is a Better JavaScript for the Ambient Web Era.

On the Friday morning, Alex Feyerke inspired us all to take a look at the Offline First approach.

Rod Vagg exhorted us to Embrace the Asynchronous.

Ben Birch showed us some of the new native data structures available in modern JavaScript.

Mark Dalgleish continued the JavaScript thread on Friday morning and taught us all about Taking JavaScript out of Context. You might also want to check out a tutorial on this from Axel Rauschmeyer that just came out.

Then we took a veer towards security and Mark Nottingham let us in on What’s Happening in TLS (that’s what the cool kids call HTTPS).

Paul Theriault continued that theme with Taking Front-end Security Seriously.

Damon Oehlman
showed us how Streaming the Web is not what we think.

Alex Mackey told us to Harden Up Our Ajax!

Lastly, Tantek Çelik inspired us all by closing out the show with The Once and Future IndieWeb. Here’s the Dan Gillmor article Tantek mentioned, and here’s where you can get started building your own little corner of the IndieWeb.

Missed out?

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Three days of talks, two of them in the engineering room. Web Directions you have broken my brain.

Cheryl Gledhill Product Manager, BlueChilli