Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Web Directions is right in the middle of one of our What Do You Know series, where we pack up shop and traipse around the country for a couple of weeks, putting on shows for the local web communities, this time in Canberra and Melbourne (last week), then Brisbane and Sydney (later this week). Will you be joining us somewhere?

I wanted to do a wrap up of the first ever What Do You Know in our nation’s capital. Canberra might have been a bit of a ghost town on the Wednesday night before the federal election, but we had a great turnout, and some excellent presentations, for the first ever show we have done here. We’ll be back for sure, though maybe not at Mooseheads :)

Kicking off the night was Web Directions’s very good longtime friend, Ruth Ellison, who was an attendee at the first ever Web Essentials conference, way back in 2004. Like many of us over the years, Ruth has both stepped sideways and moved upwards on the web, but she has always been passionate about … robots! She gave a very inspirational presentation called The Rise of the Makers, which was all about maker culture, and how it is something that people who work on the web are very well placed to pursue. One thing she urged everyone who is interested to follow up on is hackerspaces, in particular Make Hack Void, the Canberra Hackerspace. She also spoke about the Robohand prosthetic limb project, so check that out as well.

Next up we had Hugh Evans, from local design studio Icelab, who told us all about High Availability – The Easy Way, with cloud services.

After the break, with drinks and food courtesy of SilverStripe, Damon Oehlman showed us how to Ride the Web RTC Wave, And Not Drown in the Swell. WebRTC is both cool and hot, once you have checked out What is WebRTC, get ready to dive into the spec to really see what is happening in the space. And for a bit of fun and just one idea of the possibilities in this exciting area, check out John’s tutorial Build a motion activated security camera, with WebRTC, canvas and Device Orientation.

JavaScript was next on the agenda, with Christopher Giffard showing us how to Hack JavaScript for Fun and Profit (PDF). Chris referenced Dr Axel Rauschmayer’s article on JavaScript operator overloading. Axel’s actually going to be here for the dev track at Web Directions South this year, where he will also be hosting a full day workshop, Diving Deeply into JavaScript. He went into how overloading the JS += operator is possible, if a little contrived and probably unusable – here’s the Gist.

Then closing out the night we had another long lost Web Directions friend, Matthew Hodgson, who showed us how to get up and running with Kanban. To follow up, check out:

• Demystifying Agile by Zen Ex Machine
• Demystifying kanban by Al Shalloway (PDF)
• Personal Kanban by Jim Benson

And that about wrapped it all up for what was a very successful first ever Canberra What Do You Know. We’ll be back!