Presentations about coding

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Rob Mitchell & Mike Williams — Test your JavaScript

Rob Mitchell PortraitMike Williams PortraitMike Williams and Rob Mitchell will explain why you should test your JavaScript code, what to test, and how to go about it. They’ll talk about full-​​stack browser-​​based tests, as well as true unit tests, and explain where each are appro­pri­ate. They’ll also dis­cuss inte­gra­tion of your tests into an auto­mated build, and you’ll leave with a burn­ing desire to try it out on your own projects.

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Mark Stanton — Best practices for speeding up your site

Mark Stanton PortraitAs we pack our pages with AJAX and RIA good­ness we often lose sight of the fact that the key to excep­tional user expe­ri­ence is the respon­sive­ness of your site. Inspired by the excel­lent work by Yahoo!’s Excep­tional Per­for­mance team, this talk will have some­thing that every site can ben­e­fit from. You will learn how to analyse what your end users are expe­ri­enc­ing and how to reduce your load times by 25 – 50% using a range of sim­ple techniques.

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Dmitry Baranovskiy — Canvas

Dmitry Baranovskiy PortraitIn this ses­sion, JavaScript ninja Dmitry Bara­novskiy takes us into the heart and soul of Can­vas, look­ing at what it does well, and not so well, how well it is sup­ported, and how to use it in cross browser com­pat­i­ble ways. Devel­op­ers with a good grasp of JavaScript will be able to add another dimen­sion to their web solu­tions based on what they learn in this session.

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Fergus Pitt & David Peterson — The mashed up playlist

Fergus Pitt PortraitDavid Peterson PortraitThe ABC launched three new socially net­worked dig­i­tal radio web­sites: ABC Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Coun­try in July 2009. They are the first of sev­eral ABC projects involv­ing con­tent aggre­ga­tion. As well as hav­ing slick, highly usable designs the music plat­form inte­grates with var­i­ous sources includ­ing MusicBrainz, YouTube, Last​.fm and Wikipedia. This aggre­ga­tion func­tion­al­ity graph­i­cally illus­trates the pos­si­bil­i­ties of Seman­tic Web tech­nol­ogy for an edi­to­r­ial organ­i­sa­tion such as the ABC.

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Elliot Jay Stocks — Progressive enhancement

Elliot Jay Stocks PortraitIn the sum­mer of ‘07 in a flood-​​soaked Oxford, Eng­land, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His pre­sen­ta­tion, ‘Pro­gres­sive Enhance­ment & Inten­tional Degra­da­tion’, looked at how to reward mod­ern browsers with the lat­est CSS tricks and pun­ish IE by drop­ping cer­tain site fea­tures. Over two years later, what has changed? We’re start­ing to see the ide­ol­ogy of pro­gres­sive enhance­ment — espe­cially with CSS3 — spread through­out the web design com­mu­nity, but more work needs to be done.

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Lachlan Hardy — The open web

Lachlan Hardy PortraitThe Open Web is an evolv­ing term that encom­passes tech­nolo­gies from web stan­dards stal­warts like HTML, to almost-​​mainstream buzz­words such as OpenID, and on to emerg­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions like Portable­Con­tacts, but it’s more than that. It is a philosophy.

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Doug Schepers — W3C and web standards big picture

Doug Schepers PortraitDoug will talk about the tech­nolo­gies cur­rently under devel­op­ment at W3C which we are likely to see in browsers now or in the near future, and will have demos of as many of them as pos­si­ble. Some of these demos will be HTML5 demos, but also tech­nolo­gies from the WebApps WG, Device API and Poli­cies WG, CSS, SVG, geolo­ca­tion, etc. He will clear the air about HTML vs. XHTML, and why they are not as far apart as peo­ple think.

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Mark Birbeck — Marking up content with RDFa

Mark Birbeck PortraitRDFa is at the cor­ner­stone of the Browser Web and the Seman­tic Web. With RDFa, pub­lish­ing data becomes as easy as pub­lish­ing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and lever­age all the URI-​​based data inte­gra­tion fea­tures brought by Seman­tic Web and Link­ing Open Data technologies.

In this intro­duc­tory ses­sion pri­mar­ily directed at those who author web con­tent, Mark will touch a range of RDFa top­ics from its goals and how it came about, to its rela­tion­ship to linked data and how it’s being used in some recent projects for UK Gov­ern­ment web-​​sites.

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Kevin Yank — CSS frameworks

Kevin Yank PortraitWith the pro­lif­er­a­tion and wide­spread adop­tion of JavaScript frame­works, smart devel­op­ers have won­dered if a sim­i­lar approach to smooth­ing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frame­works like Blue­print, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boil­er­plate, and many oth­ers were born. In this ses­sion, we will sur­vey the land­scape of CSS frame­works and con­sider how each of them deals with the unique chal­lenge of cre­at­ing gen­er­alised, reusable CSS styles.

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Ben Galbraith — The state of developer tools

Ben Galbraith PortraitIn this ses­sion, co-​​founder of Ajax​ian​.com, and The Ajax Expe­ri­ence con­fer­ences, and now head of Mozilla Foundation’s new Tools team Ben Gal­braith will take us on an expe­di­tion through the devel­oper tools land­scape. Learn what’s out there, and what they can do to make you more pro­duc­tive, your sites and appli­ca­tions bet­ter and faster, and your life as a devel­oper more enjoyable.

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David Peterson — Semantic web for distributed social networks

Web Direc­tions South 2008, Syd­ney Con­ven­tion Cen­tre, Sep­tem­ber 26 2.40pm.

David Peterson PortraitHear how Dru­pal, Seman­tic Medi­aWiki and other bleed­ing edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basi­cally all the Seman­tic Web stuff) to build a dis­trib­uted social net­work. The focus will be not on evan­ge­lism (I don’t really care about that) but how dis­parate open source plat­forms can talk and work together. This stuff actu­ally works and makes devel­op­ment more fluid. These tech­nolo­gies make local devel­op­ment eas­ier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, clas­sic search is still king. How can you lever­age this? New­com­ers such as Yahoo Search­mon­key can play an impor­tant role in the cre­ation of a truly dis­trib­uted infor­ma­tion system.

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Diana Mounter — Custom V CMS — don’t take sides

Web Direc­tions South 2008, Syd­ney Con­ven­tion Cen­tre, Sep­tem­ber 26 11.45am.

Diana Mounter PortraitWhen I was intro­duced into the role of man­ag­ing web projects, I naively believed a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem would solve all my prob­lems. Grow­ing my lit­tle empire of con­tent authors I had lit­tle idea of what was to come– before I knew it I had cre­ated a monster.

I went search­ing for a white knight to slay this mon­ster and was tempted by the delights of cus­tom builds, agile devel­op­ment, and ruby on rails. And off I went fol­low­ing the trail of bread­crumbs into the for­est eat­ing them as I went, but then oh, how do I get back to my old friend CMS? Hmmm.

This ses­sion will help you know how to make the choice between the sweet delights of cus­tom builds and the faith­ful work­horse CMS. How to get them to play nice, grow grace­fully, and present together as a seam­less front-​​end user experience.

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Panel — Choosing the right web application framework

The new era of web appli­ca­tions has intro­duced to us a num­ber of frame­works designed to aid in rapid devel­op­ment. But, no mat­ter what your pre­ferred lan­guage, find­ing a suit­able frame­work is not usu­ally an easy task.

In this inten­sive 2 hour ses­sion you’ll hear from sev­eral devel­op­ers who’ll dis­cuss which frame­works they chose, why they love them; why they hate them, and gain valu­able insights to help you choose the right tools for your job. We will focus pri­mar­ily on Rails (Ruby), Joomla! (PHP), Struts/​Spring (Java) and Django (Python).

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Jina Bolton — Creating sexy stylesheets

Web Direc­tions South 2008, Syd­ney Con­ven­tion Cen­tre, Sep­tem­ber 26 10.45am.

Jina Bolton PortraitBeing a CSS expert is about more than just mem­o­riz­ing selec­tors. It’s also about work­ing to improve the main­tain­abil­ity and effi­ciency of your style sheets, plan­ning for the future, and mas­ter­ing your work­flow. This ses­sion will look at push­ing the lim­its of CSS to cre­ate stun­ning inter­faces using clean, mean­ing­ful markup. We’ll also look at CSS 3 and at what the future of Web design could look like when CSS 3 finally becomes mainstream.

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Pete Ottery & Tim Lucas — Developing for iPhone

Web Direc­tions South 2008, Syd­ney Con­ven­tion Cen­tre, Sep­tem­ber 25 11.45am.

Tim Lucas Portrait Peter Ottery PortraitThe release of Apple’s iPhone brings new oppor­tu­ni­ties for web sites and web apps on hand­held devices, though not with­out its share of chal­lenges and best practices.

Tim and Pete will look at the best exam­ples out in the wild and share their expe­ri­ence cre­at­ing iphone​.news​.com​.au — one of Australia’s largest news sites, news​.com​.au, tai­lored to the iPhone.

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Dmitry Baranovskiy — Start using web vector graphics today

Web Direc­tions South 2008, Syd­ney Con­ven­tion Cen­tre, Sep­tem­ber 25 10.45am.

Dmitry Baranovskiy  PortraitWith the growth of inter­ac­tiv­ity in web appli­ca­tions we are push­ing Javascript to its lim­its, not to men­tion the lim­its of HTML and CSS. And so we spend our days resort­ing to Flash, wait­ing for that dis­tant time when browser sup­port for CSS3 will come to our res­cue and allow us to cre­ate the UIs we dream of. But this is not the way it has to be: there is a lit­tle known secret weapon right here in most mod­ern browsers. Yes, even in IE6.

Dmitry Bara­novskiy is here to tell you about Can­vas, SVG and VML. Come along and be amazed by stan­dards based UI wiz­ardry you can start imple­ment­ing in projects right here, right now.

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Patrick Lee — One paper clip, a box of matches, and some JavaScript

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at at Web Direc­tions Gov­ern­ment, Old Par­lia­ment House, Can­berra, May 19 2008.

Patrick Lee PortraitWho­ever you are, if you’re writ­ing JavaScript, there’s some aspect of your devel­op­ment that you would love to change if you had the chance. But the real­ity is you’ll never find your­self work­ing in this ideal envi­ron­ment: deal­ing with legacy browsers, plat­forms and con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems will be your con­stant as a devel­oper. Patrick Lee is going to show you some tools and tech­niques that will help you make your peace with this fact.

This ses­sion will explore how you can find ways to do the cool stuff you really want to do with JavaScript whilst work­ing in the real world. And you won’t even have to sell your soul in the process.

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Jonathan Snook – Working with Ajax Frameworks

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Direc­tions North, Van­cou­ver Canada, Jan­u­ary 30 2008.

Jonathon Snook Portrait It seems like there’s a new Ajax library or JavaScript frame­work com­ing out every week, and there prob­a­bly is! Which is the best one to pick? Will you be up the creek with­out a pad­dle if you choose the wrong one?

Work­ing with Ajax Frame­works” will delve into some com­mon Ajax design pat­terns and how var­i­ous frame­works can be used to meet those needs. We’ll also take a look at how we can keep our own code flex­i­ble as we bridge the gap between it and the var­i­ous frameworks.

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Andrew Downie and Grant Focas — Javascript and other coding for good or evil

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Direc­tions South, Syd­ney Aus­tralia, Sep­tem­ber 28 2007.

Andrew Downie PortraitGrant Focas PortraitWhen Ver­sion 2 of the Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines is finally released, the sta­tus of Javascript will be quite dif­fer­ent to that assigned to it in Ver­sion 1.0 back in 1999. Back then, Javascript was to “degrade grace­fully”. Cur­rently AJAX offers increased usabil­ity for visual users, but may detract from acces­si­bil­ity. In future, use of JavaScript will be encour­aged but, of course, must enhance rather than detract from acces­si­bil­ity. Dur­ing this pre­sen­ta­tion, Andrew and Grant will demon­strate how Javascript, when imple­mented well, offers enhanced acces­si­bil­ity. By way of bal­ance, they will also present exam­ples of script­ing that causes prob­lems. Impor­tantly, they will pro­vide cor­rec­tions to the errant coding.

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Adrian Holovaty — Being smart about your data

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Direc­tions South, Syd­ney Aus­tralia, Sep­tem­ber 28 2007.

Adrian Holovaty PortraitThe Web is full of infor­ma­tion that is pre­sented inef­fi­ciently — both for machines and for humans. Adrian Holo­vaty shares philoso­phies and strate­gies for effi­cient data col­lec­tion and infor­ma­tion design, draw­ing from his expe­ri­ences at data-​​heavy news sites lawrence​.com, wash​ing​ton​post​.com) and side projects such as chicagocrime​.org.

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Aaron Gustafson — Learning to love forms

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Direc­tions South, Syd­ney Aus­tralia, Sep­tem­ber 28 2007.

Aaron Gustafson PortraitForms. We all have to make ‘em, but few of us love ‘em. Aaron Gustafson believes that this is because we don’t under­stand them. In this ses­sion, we will explore forms from top to bot­tom, exam­in­ing how they work and how their com­po­nents can be incor­po­rated with other ele­ments to max­i­mize acces­si­bil­ity, improve seman­tics, and allow for more flex­i­ble styling. You’ll get to see the com­plete pic­ture with forms, includ­ing error, warn­ing and for­mat­ting mes­sages, styling and its impli­ca­tions, as well as best prac­tices for manip­u­la­tion with Javascript and Ajax.

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Bert Bos — A new life for old standards

Bert Bos PortraitCSS level 2 became a stan­dard in 1998. The last revi­sion of HTML4 dates from 1999. That’s long time ago in Web years, but they aren’t for­got­ten: after sev­eral years of work, CSS is close to a revi­sion and browser sup­port is bet­ter than ever. It’s nec­es­sary, because CSS needs to grow: ver­ti­cal text, columns, print sup­port, com­plex lay­outs and much more is increas­ingly demanded. Like­wise, there is a big effort to revise HTML. Inter­est is so high, the W3C is try­ing a new process, to let more peo­ple par­tic­i­pate in the edit­ing work. There are also new forms, stan­dards for com­bin­ing SVG and HTML and new work on the secu­rity of forms. Bert’s here to tell us: we haven’t seen the end of the Web page yet.

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Jeremy Keith — Explaining Ajax

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Direc­tions South, Syd­ney Aus­tralia, Sep­tem­ber 28 2006.

Jeremy Keith Portrait

Apart from being the buzz­word de jour, what is this Ajax stuff that every­one is talk­ing about? Take a look at some imple­men­ta­tions out there and start think­ing about how Ajax can add value to your site. See the slides and hear the podcast »

John Allsopp — Microformats

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Direc­tions South, Syd­ney Aus­tralia, Sep­tem­ber 28 2006.

John Allsop Portrait

The prob­lem of bring­ing richer seman­tics to the world wide web has been chal­leng­ing stan­dards bod­ies and devel­op­ers for sev­eral years. Approaches like “The Seman­tic Web” promise much, but require us to throw away the accu­mu­lated efforts, skills and tools of more than a decade. Over the last year or two, an evo­lu­tion­ary approach to richer seman­tics for today’s web, based on HTML, cur­rent devel­oper prac­tices, and tools, called Micro­for­mats, has been spread­ing like wild­fire among tool devel­op­ers, and web pub­lish­ers large and small.

In this pre­sen­ta­tion John All­sopp looks at why micro­for­mats are nec­es­sary, what organ­i­sa­tions like Yahoo! are doing with them, and how your organ­i­sa­tion can ben­e­fit from them right now. See the slides and hear the podcast »