But a platform we’ve been excited about for some time, Blackberry 10, makes web technologies first class citizens.

BlackBerry’s browser is a modern webkit browser, with industry leading scores in terms of performance, and feature support. But, unlike with many other platforms, Web developers get access to low level device APIs right from JavaScript. You can debug your apps using a web browser on your desktop, while they run natively on the device, and then package your apps to be deployed in BlackBerry World, the app storefront for the BlackBerry platform.

So, if you’ve already got mobile friendly or optimised content or apps, it makes sense to consider spending that little bit of extra effort to turn it into a BlackBerry 10 Native App.

Web Directions Code Blackberry App Competition

To give you just a little more incentive, BlackBerry are holding a competition for Australian and New Zealand residents, with top entrants showcased at Web Directions Code, and some pretty awesome prizes. And you don’t have to be attending Code to enter!

What you have to do

1. Check out http://developer.blackberry.com/html5 for platform documentation/tools
2. Create a mobile app using web technologies (and phoneGap or WebWorks)
3. Submit a .bar app file to csaunders@blackberry.com (with a short description for voters) by noon on May 1st AEST.
4. Win awesome prizes!

so, you’re thinking this is going to be a lot of work. Think again! And to give you a little more incentive, here’s what’s on offer.

Prizes

First Prize

1. All expenses paid trip to BlackBerry Jam Asia 2013
2. BlackBerry Z10 smartphone
3. $2000 cash

Second Prize

1. BlackBerry Z10 smartphone
2. $1500 cash

Third Prize All

1. BlackBerry Z10 smartphone
2. $1000 cash

All voters at Web Directions Code will walk away with great swag!

Judging

Judging will have two components:

1. A crowd vote by attendees at Web Directions Code
2. Judging by a panel of Judges including Chris Saunders from BlackBerry and John Allsopp from Web Directions

The Workshop

To make it even easier to enter, Chris Saunders from BlackBerry will be hosting a workshop at Web Directions secret lair in Sydney, from 2pm to 5pm, Friday April 26th. Just bring your laptop, and code, and have Chris on hand to help you get up to speed, and maybe even complete your porting job, as well as test on some real live Blackberry 10 devices, before winding up the week with a beer. Then head around to #Fridayat4 to catch up with many more from the Sydney web community

It’s free, but places are limited, so sign up now, and get in the running for a trip to South East Asia later this year for BlackBerry Jam Asia (including flights and accommodation), cash prizes, and brand new BlackBerry devices.

Thanks to everyone that came along in Melbourne — all 200 of you! As we mentioned on the night, the rooftop marquee (a substantially larger and better laid out space) was torn down in the winds on Good Friday, leaving us with no choice but to move to the less ideal basement space. Thanks for bearing with us.

We started the evening with Mark Dalgleish, who always does such a great job of presenting. This time he went all recursive on us and talked through Bespoke.js, his DIY presentation Microframework. Check out the presentation itself here.

Next up, for something completely different we had Carla Hackett who showed us all about the fine old art of hand lettering. Carla’s beautiful presentation is all written up in this blog post, and check her out on Instagram for all the examples of hand lettering she finds on the streets of Melbourne. For another example of how hand lettering might be used check out her intro to this Catherine Deveny interview.

Joji Mori was next, talking us through his fascinating PhD project, which is all about how we can commemorate online. Here is the work he has done for Black Saturday.

Then there was another change of course as Brad Barrow told us about Front-end testing, and introduced us to the startup he is part of, earl.io

Leading into the break we had Harriet Wakelam, who showed us How to Design Without P**ing People Off — harder than you think! Her slides are here.

After a quick refreshment break we jumped straight back into the deepend, as Alex Mackey demoed RX.js in a rush. You can download his full presentation here, and read his Intro to RX.js here.

Donna Benjamin was next, giving us a Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Drupalverse. If your curiosity is piqued, get along to the Drupal Melbourne meetup some time, or check out the IRC Channel (not for the fainthearted :).

Chris Chinchilla showed us how easy it is to use PhoneGap to create mobile apps using our HTML, JS and CSS skills. To connect with Chris, get along to Mobile Monday Melbourne.

Michael Mifsud showed us an interesting experiment he has done whereby he outsourced his holiday via GitHub.

And then to end the night Leni Mayo told us all about The Innovator’s Dilemna, using NoSQL vs MySQL as an example. Check out The Innovator’s Dilemna book here.

And that about wrapped it all up for the first What Do You Know season for 2013. We’ll be back round August/September — see you then!

All the presenters did a fantastic job, even in “The Bermuda Triangle of AV” which is The Exchange Hotel, and they’ve all been kind enough to share some resources from their presentations.

First up was Carolyn King, who showed us how most presentations suck, and how to stop ours from doing so. Carolyn’s written her presentation up in a blog post so check it out.

Brandon Sheppard was on next, with an amusing and instructive presentation called “Rebuilding the Flanders House”, which used a great analogy for poor design of “putting the toilet in the kitchen”. You had to be there! He recommends checking out Retinart for great articles about serious design theory.

Before the break Anthony vander Hoorn showed us Glimpse, an open source diagnostics platform he is the creator of — well worth checking it out! And for a bit of fun, take a look at I Drink Lead Paint, this is where Anthony sourced all those images he used in his presentation (hint, you can too :)

Simon Elvery wowed us all with his choose your own adventure approach to responsive images. This really is cool. Instead of slides he built a mini-site that takes you through a series of decisions about responsive images, then presents you with some options at the end. Of course, it’s not comprehensive, but Simon’s Choose Your Own Adventure approach to selecting a responsive images technique is certainly a great place to start if you are trying to get your head around responsive images. There’s some more resources in his Responding to the Unknown blog post as well.

Closing out the night we had Luke Brooker, with more on responsive design with Inconsistent Consistencies.

Thanks again Brisbane and see you again soon!

Challenging F Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum, since turning the ripe old age of 10 it has had something of a second act, in no small part thanks to Ethan Marcotte’s hugely influential Responsive Web Design article itself published in A List Apart, now coming up on three years of age.

Rarely a few days go by these days that I don’t see some tweet about the article, which I would have found remarkable in 2000. At that time, as I’ve remarked before, I really felt the article stated the obvious, and would quickly become a quaint footnote in history, a remembrance of a web past.

I’m currently working on something of a reappraisal, which I hope to publish in the coming weeks. And I’m definitely interested in your thoughts about what value, if any, A Dao of Web Design has in 2013, when the future we saw far ahead in 2000 has well and truly arrived.

Feel free to leave thoughts, long or short, critical, or otherwise, below.

Thanks for coming along if you were there, and if you weren’t, make sure you are following @webdirections, or receiving our newsletter, to be the first to know about upcoming events. For now we’re focussing on Web Directions Code in Melbourne on May 2 and 3, but later in the year there will be definitely be another What Do You Know series around the country.

I’ve pulled together some handy resources that came out of the presentations, so see below for everything from functional JavaScript to better web typography.

We kicked off the evening with a word from our awesome sponsors, as Shane Weddell showed us how to use SilverStripe CMS and framework to create the web.

Next up rookie presenter Fiona Chan did an outstanding job of her first presentation ever by showing us how to create a living style guide. To refresh your memory, Fiona’s slides are here, and here are some useful resources for taking it further

• a collection of front end style guides and pattern libraries
• Anna Debenham’s 24 Ways article on front end style guides
• Making front end development a team sport

Then David Rennie from Reactive demonstrated presented on responsive design, and in particular how pen and paper are the most powerful web design tools. To follow up on this check out David’s awesomely good value workshop — Jedi responsive design workflow — on this Thursday here in Sydney.

Patrick Catanzariti, always entertaining, showed us some <video> and <canvas> element experiments.

Dhanji Prassana dived into functional programming as applied to JavaScript, which was always bound to be controversial, but to their credit the polite Sydney audience kept heckling to a minimum. To find out more, start with the Wikipedia article on Functional Programming. Got that? Then check out Underscore.js, a light and easy functional programming framework for JavaScript, whose creator, Jeremy Ashkenas, will be speaking at Web Directions Code. And then when you’re ready, Functional JavaScript.

Elle Meredith showed us Better Web Typography with Modular Scale. Her slides are here, and she also sent through a very useful collection of resources to follow up with

• Tim Brown — More Perfect Typography (video)
• More Meaningful Typography
• Type-inspired interfaces
• R(a|ela)tional Design
• The Secret Law of Page Harmony
• Page Proportions (PDF)
• Composing the new canon
• The Typographic Scale

David Lewis showed us how to build an HTML5 game in 5 minutes, using Construct 2. Here’s the game — keep Ned Stark’s head off the ground! — plus David has also done a write up of another game he built using the same tech.

And then finally to close out the show Elijah Glover showed us some HTML5 Mobile Apps tips and tricks. He also shared an ultimate guide to mobile emulators and simulators, as well as a table for HTML5 compatibility on mobile and tablet browsers.

• don’t be afraid to put your hand up!
• research previous events and come up with something appropriate for the event

How to endear yourself to the event organiser

• be an awesome correspondent!
• read all the info you receive about your role in the event carefully — and ask questions if they haven’t been answered (where do I have to be? when do I have to be there? who do I report to? what resolution will the projector be? how long should I speak for? See the resources in the final section below for a couple of great blog posts that will give you countless questions like this).
• be reliable (be where you are meant to be at the time you are meant to be there; get there early; get an emergency contact number before the event; have some contingency plans for getting to the venue — again see the links in the resources section below for much more practical advice like this)

After the presentation

Do as much as is feasible to maximise the chance of ongoing engagement after the presentation.

• at the very least, upload your slides to Slideshare or Speakerdeck
• write a blog post
• create a whole minisite — check out this one created by Charlie Gleason for his presentation at Web Directions South last year
• tweet out links to whatever you do using the hashtag from the event, and let the organiser know about it as well

Events to approach about presenting

Meetup groups

These are a fantastic way of getting your foot in the door and your name out there. Go along to a few first, get to know the organiser, and then propose a session.

• Melbourne Web Developers
• MelbJS
• Melbourne Geek Night
• Melbourne Joomla!
• Rails Nights
• Melbourne Mobile

And then something Web Directions has coming up on April 4 is What Do You Know — we’ll definitely be looking for presenters!

Technology specific events

• OSDC: late November/early December, this year maybe Auckland
• linux.conf.au: January, Perth
• SAGE-AU: around August
• Pycon: July, Hobart
• Drupal Downunder: mid-February, Sydney
• JSConf Downunder: November, Sydney
• Ruby Conf AU: February, Melbourne
• OZeWAI: October, Melbourne

Professional industry events

• Web Directions Code: May, Melbourne
• Web Directions South: October, Sydney
• UX Australia — Melbourne
• TechED

More resources

• Scott Berkun blogs frequently about public speaking, and wrote this excellent checklist that will get you there on time and ready to go on the day
• Joe Clarke has an even more belt and braces approach
• Aaron Weyenberg spoke (brilliantly!) for the first time for us in Seattle a couple of years back and wrote this really useful and inspirational blog post afterwards: Confessions of a Rookie Speaker

• “there’s too much choice”
• “I find it hard to decide which session to go to”

I’ll admit, we always found this feedback a little hard to take in, because what we try to do with Web Directions South is make it a massive festival and meeting of the web tribes, and a one track conference obviously just can’t achieve this. We love our program of thought provoking and inspirational keynotes at the beginning and end of each day, sandwiching split session throughout the day covering off design, development, the big picture, and this year for the first time, startups. There’s something for the whole web family. But the unusual thing about the web family is that it’s pretty omnivorous. The developer could well be just as interested in a session about JavaScript performance as one on bootstrapping your startup. The designer might be just as happy hearing about interaction design as big data.

So last year we did a couple of things to ease the pain of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Part of this pain is just the stress of having to make a high opportunity cost decision under time pressure on the day as to what to see, so we made sure our schedule was finalised well before the event, and also made a nice PDF version of it available before the day, so if you wanted to take the time to plan in advance, this was there to help you. Pretty easy and inexpensive to do.

But a big part of it is also just not actually being able to be in two places at once. We’d provided audio recordings and made the slides available for years but we all know, it’s just not the same. Situations like this are pretty much why god invented video really. But good video requires a good team to capture on the day, and is expensive to produce. The other thing we have always struggled with is the fear we have that if we video everything and just put it out there for free on the web after the event, will people continue to come to the actual event itself?

That’s why this year at Web Directions South we produced all this video, but have only made it available to people who were actually at the event for the time being — please get in touch if you were there and haven’t received your username and password and we’ll get that to your straight away.

There is also a free sample video available to everyone: Douglas Crockford’s awesome developer track session “Programming Style and your Brain”.

What’s been interesting though is looking at the stats of which videos have been the most popular. Bearing in mind that attendees said they wanted video so they could catch up on sessions they weren’t able to see on the day because they chose to go and see another presentation, I’m still pondering the fact that the most popular video by far is Ben Hammersley’s keynote, The Flower, the Field and the Stack — which everyone must have seen on the day. Humans, hey? They’re a weird mob :). In fairness, it was an amazing presentation and well worth reliving.

How do I get to see these amazing videos?

And if you weren’t there? Well there is still a way to see it. Anyone who buys a ticket to Web Directions Code — our awesome developer focussed event this May in Melbourne — will also get a free pass to all those Web Directions South videos. So get in there now while early bird pricing lasts for the bargain of the month!

Last year’s risk was a brand new conference, focussing on programming for the web. A single track conference, with let’s face it, a pretty geeky focus.

We also took the risk of moving it all to another city, Melbourne. A city we love. A city where we’ve done quite a bit over the years. But also not our home city.

Web Directions Code in 2012 was a resounding success.

It sold out.
Attendees responded incredibly positively.
The vibe of a single track conference, with everyone together for every session, every break, the parties and socialising was fantastic.

We also took a risk with the content. We’ve pretty much always had every session the same length — 45 min to an hour. This time we mixed it up, with hyper-focussed 15 minute sessions along side the more traditional length of 50 minutes.

This too worked fantastically, so much so that we incorporated similar focussed sessions at Web Directions South later in the year, and we’ll be sticking with this format into the future.

Right away, we knew we wanted to make Code an ongoing event, and we began working on Code 13 almost right away.

And today, all that work comes to the light of day, as we announce Web Directions Code 2013, in Melbourne, May2 and 3 (with workshops on May 1).

A single track once more, focussing on the art and science of programming for the web with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Featuring CoffeeScript and Backbone inventor Jeremy Ashkenas, everyone’s favourite “big CSS” guru Nicole Sullivan, Etsy’s Garann Means, “Mr Maths” Steven Whittens (you’ve marvelled at his 3D CSS3 based website), Twitter’s Angus Croll, as well as many other local and international experts in JavaScript, CSS and HTML5.

Code is about becoming a better developer, a better programmer. About understanding our craft better, about improving the quality of our work.
And like all Web Directions events, it’s also about engaging with your peers, encouraging interesting conversations, and having a bit of fun as well.

If you want to get a sense of what it’s about, take a look at some of the presentations from last year, and clear your calendar for May 2 and 3 (and also check out our workshop with Nicole Sullivan on May 1), a rare chance to work with one of the most knowledgeable web development experts anywhere.

Hope to see you in Melbourne in early May!

John and Maxine

As noted, there was some irony in the fact is was a PDF. Well, prepare for more irony, as we’ve just published a new, updated version, and there’s now both a PDF, and an iBooks version, available from iTunes, and still free. And we’ve updated the PDF version as well.

HTML5 for Creatives takes a high level, yet in depth, look at the capabilities, use cases, strengths and limitations of the whole suite of related technologies that are broadly referred to as “HTML5”. It’s written specifically for people who make decisions about the use of technologies, particularly in the creative industries, (but it’s more than a little relevant for other industries as well) rather than for developers and implementors. We keep it high level, so there’s no code to worry about, but we’ll also delve into these technologies in some detail.

So if you need to know more about what HTML5 is, and what it can do for you, then grab a copy. Or if your client, manager, or some other decision maker you work with needs to get up to speed with modern web technologies, then send them a copy (or print it out and put it on their desk!)

Now, at Web Directions, we’ve been holding events for this industry since 2004. And, if you take a look at our lineups over the last few years, you’ll see that women on the whole tend to be pretty well represented (and you know, there are other groups that it might be important to consider who are under represented on our collective stages, so hopefully we can start addressing that issue as well).

First, if you don’t think a diversity of representation, in and of itself, is important at events like these, please stop reading now. Really, there’s no point. I believe, in and of itself, this is an important goal. You might believe that quality in and of itself, unconstrained by any other consideration is all that matters.
I don’t.

Because everything we do has all sorts of subtle consequences. And to me, it’s important to do your best to think about those consequences, and ensure the outcomes from these are better, rather than worse than they otherwise might be.

Let me give you an example.
Suppose that you are running a conference about X. And suppose that the very best speaker on earth about (like so much better than anyone else that no one will even argue with you)
is also a racist, homophobic misogynist.
If all that matters is their presentation on its merits, then of course you’d have them speak right?

BTW, this is not a straw man argument. This is called a “reductio ad absurdum” argument.

• Assume something is true.
• Derive something false based on that assumption
• Demonstrate the assumption is false
• It’s maths people, it works.

OK, so if you are still reading, let’s think this through a bit.

You want the best possible content
you want to represent a diversity of people in our industry/community

How do you go about this?

Here’s how you don’t go about it (at least in our opinion at Web Directions, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is for years on this).

Don’t have a request for proposals.

1. If you make your decision based on proposals, you have people on stage who are the best at writing proposals. The best at writing presentation abstracts.
Which is almost 100% unrelated to whether they’ll present well.
Because presentation is about a great deal more. It’s about

• stage presence, including personality, comprehensibility, warmth, humour
• quality of narrative
• quality of slides
• content of presentation

2. You will get a certain kind of person, disproportionately male, who will submit a proposal. This doesn’t make them bad people. Indeed, the sort of confidence to back themselves probably (I’ve no evidence for this, sounds intuitive, which when it comes to human nature gets tricky) means they’re more likely to have the kind of confident stage presence that makes people feel comfortable. But then again, maybe they are self overestimating tossers, who will make the audience hate them.

You’d be surprised, by the way, how many PR people contact us about their awesome client, who would so improve the quality of our event by stringing together jargon laden cliches and buzzwords. We have a special gmail folder for those ones.

Purely submission driven events are always going to be over represented with men. Blind assessment of these submissions is not going to change this. Because you are starting by regarding a certain kind of personality type that is disproportionately male.

3. Unrelated to the main topic, but important issue. You are the convenor. Think of yourself as an editor. The content and structure of your event is your responsibility, not that of random submissions. At Web Directions, we turn this process upside down. We think about issues that are important to our audience (not just ones that are hot right now), and structure a program around these. We then look for speakers to address these issues. And by look, I mean really spend a lot of time and effort locating potential speakers who can address the issue well, who can present, and contribute to the overall event (which is more than simply speaking, we feel it is important that speakers are there for more than just their slot if at all possible).

Scout

Maxine and I spend a great deal of time scouring the web for interesting blog posts, articles, slideshare decks. We look for intelligent people saying interesting, non obvious things. If they can express these things well, visually, in writing, then maybe there’s a good chance they can do this on stage as well.

nurture

Web Directions runs all kinds of free events around Australia, and supports others like Ignite, Trampoline, and more, which give people an opportunity to begin, and further their presentation career. What Do you Know this year featured nearly 70 speakers, some experienced, many we’d never seen before, sharing their expertise. Some of them went from there to speaking at our main events. We hope, and believe many more will too.

We also give people the opportunity to get a taste of what it is like up on our stage by introducing speakers. More than one person first graced a stage as a Web Directions session MC, and has gone on to speak at the event. Even to Keynote our events.

And recently, we’ve experimented with session formats, introducing 15 minute, highly focussed sessions, that make the transition to speaking about something you’re passionate about less daunting than starting with a 50 minute extravaganza.

Work at it

You really have to work at this to make it happen. It is true in our experience that women are less likely to put themselves forward, and more likely to turn down an invitation.
Do we have a quota? There’s no number we must hit, but we look for balance, and we kind of just know when we don’t have it. When we run a multi-track event, a lack of balance might mean a fair representation in say design focussed tracks, and little or none in developer focussed tracks.
Have we ever had a substandard speaker striving for diversity. I’d say, hand on heart, no. Certainly, well known speakers leaving the audience underwhelmed is a far bigger issue.

Dirty little secret

I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret of conference organizing. The most well known speakers are rarely the ones people ultimately remember best, and rave the most about. It’s those who they’ve never heard of, who challenge them, who are. As I just mentioned, substandard presentations by “token” speakers has never been an issue for us. Substandard presentations by well known speakers has been on more than one occasion.

Trust us, “rock star” speakers won’t guarantee your event is a sell out success. This is not lollapalooza (note, now defunct) where people come to see the most popular acts.

A successful event has to reach far beyond those who follow the most well known industry voices on Twitter or comment on their blogs, to have the remotest hope of being an ongoing, sustainable event. Most of your audience won’t even know who they are. Truly.

Involve women

I have a whole swag of daughters, so from a personal perspective, this is an important issue. Going back years, decades really, equality, diversity, these have been important to me. But the truth is, I’m a staggeringly privileged person. I’m male. I’m “white”. I was born and raised in the developed world. I was sent to really good schools. I had parents who valued education, and had enough resources to invest in it for their kids. I went to about as good a University you could go to in Australia. So my perspective is ultimately basically theoretical.

Guys like me like to think that being intelligent, thinking a lot about something, knowing its history means we really understand it. In the case of things like discrimination, we really don’t.

I’ve had the even greater good fortune to have Maxine as a partner in Web Directions. Her perspective is what really guides the shape of our lineup. We discuss who should speak, about what, and why, all the time. We don’t always agree. But when it comes to this sort of issue, I trust her “spidey sense”. If you don’t have that sort of perspective, you’ll struggle. Because as well meaning, and intelligent as you are, it’s all still theoretical.

So, involve women, and others with diverse perspectives in your decision making, trust them and listen to them. Your chances of going terribly wrong will be greatly diminished.

By the way, for what it is worth, our first event, way back in 2004 had no women speaking. We realised this after putting the program together. We’ve made sure that we rectified this every subsequent year. But it demonstrates that unless you are conscious and work at this, you won’t do well enough.

In the eating

Now, while virtue is its own reward, might I point out that having been around since 2004, we’ve been around for longer than just about any event in our industry (at present I can only think of Web Visions predating us and still going, meanwhile juggernauts like Web 2.0 Expo have come and gone), with an audience of 35% to 40% women, having a commitment to diversity as a central, if not necessarily (until now at least) trumpeted core value, certainly hasn’t hurt us. Not once to my knowledge, have we been accused of tokenism. Not once has a speaker been criticised as substandard with the insinuation that they were there just to make up the numbers.

I always come back to a pretty basic question when I make a decision about important things in my life. What kind of a world do you want to live in? And how do I go about making the world a little more like that place?

At Web Directions, we’ve spent years putting our money where our beliefs are. And while it’s not why we do it, it’s paid us back in spades. And that’s a great privilege.