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

Was great to wrap up another What Do You Know roadshow last Thursday night in our home town of Sydney, with what turned out to be an incredibly diverse and entertaining collection of presentations, covering off everything web from knitting to Brunch.io. Let’s see what it was all about! And while you do that, brighten up your Monday by tuning into our playlist from the night:

WDYK April 2014 by Maxinesherrin on Mixcloud

Christopher Hunt (@huntchr) got things off to a fine start with a new approach to building applications, The Reactive Manifesto.

Regular Expressions – can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em. Elle Meredith did a terrific job, as always of explaining Regular Expressions With Ruby.

Imad Sader was next, showing us how to integrate SVG support in our build scripts.

Then Rose Matthews (@rose_matthews) took the stage to telling us all about the different types of great UX people and how to NOT keep them on your team.

Arnaud Bieri introduced us to Brunch – and that’s not the “not quite breakfast, not quite brunch, but it comes with a slice of cantalope” variety! No, we’re talking Brunch.io, the ultra-fast HTML5 build tool.

Leading us into the half-time break was Shane Weddell (@shaneweddell) of SilverStripe, who shared with us the secret of how they have built a very successful business in the open source space, by doing the opposite of conventional wisdom.

Straight after the break we took one of those wild segues for which What Do You Know is famous: Kris Howard (@web_goddess) showed us how knitting really is code in a great presentation that I’m sure will have inspired many of us to dig out the needles and yarn, I know it worked for me!

Next up Simon Swain (@simon_swain) told us to sharpen our pitchforks for 5 minutes of heresy, a motivational presentation for any developer, make sure you read the transcript.

Long time Web Directions friend Ben Buchanan – he first spoke for us in 2006, yikes! – was up next. Half of the next thing was some more motivational words for developers, on how to keep learning. Here’s those two Ueli Steck videos he mentioned – The Swiss Machine and A New Vision.

Now I must admit I was a little concerned when I set up Simon Rodwell’s (@s_roddeh) laptop on the stage and noticed he had 56 slides, for a 5 minute presentation! I don’t know how he did it, but So crypto, very currency, how website was all done in maybe 7 minutes, and we all felt a lot smarter about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by the end of it!

And that about wrapped it up, not just for Sydney, but for the whole What Do You Know Fall 2014 season. We hope you made it along, we hope you had a good time, and we hope to see you at Web Directions Code in just a few weeks now!