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What Do You Know Sydney – Wrap-up

As is tradition, we ended the September 2013 What Do You Know series with a final big Thursday night in Sydney. Hope you were able to make it along! It was a great end to another great series, and now we are well and truly rolling along to Web Directions South 2013!

The evening started with Rob Prescott of DT Digital here in Sydney, who showed us how to turn emotional desires into rational needs.

Then we had Pat Lee who shocked and awed us all with some Fear and Loathing in Las Geometria. Here Patrick was talking about a small part of the local Sydney startup he is currently working at, Canva. The code snippets were in CoffeeScript and use techniques explained in his forthcoming book CoffeeScript in Action.

Peggy Kuo was next, taking us through Meteor: A Rising Star. You can find the demo she showed off here.

Next up Nikolay Nemshilov showed us that there is life beyond jQuery, with Lovely.io. Make sure you check out the Lovely.io site, which includes a bunch of videos to get you started.

Leading into the break we had Julio Cesar Ody telling us all about Stylistic and Logic Modularity in Modern Web Apps. Also check out Single Page Apps in Depth for more on what inspired the presentation. And then to see it all in action, Lisant, Julio’s beautifully crafted bookmarking and feedreading app.

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.

Then in the last dev session of the night James Hiscock showed us how to get some Oomph out of Grunt.

Emma Chee was a big hit with her World of Wearables presentation – how inspirational was that? You can read more about the Urban Navjacket at her blog.

Andrew Harvey has thought a lot about applying distributed information systems to your team. To follow up check out his slides (Keynote download).

Then to close out the night we had Web Directions old mate Matt Allen, who told us how not to get a job on the web. If you’re looking to hire developers, or you’re a developer looking for a change, Matt works for Lookahead, who I will personally vouch for as the civilised end of the recruitment world, so check them out.

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Joe Toscano Founder, designgood.tech