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With our Code conference starting in Sydney in just a few days and in Melbourne next week, our Idea of the Week this week comes from the conference’s Scroll magazine and its editor, Ricky Onsman.

As he explains, you should definitely see what your Sydney and Melbourne code-focused meetups are up to this week and next.

Meetups at Conference Time

by Ricky Onsman

Web Directions has long been a sponsor of meetups that have a focus on web technologies. Often, these meetups in different cities around Australia provide an opportunity for conference speakers to test material in front of a willing and supportive audience, in the process helping to promote the conference and also attracting more people to the meetup.

For that reason, meetups that happen around the time of a conference event are often exciting affairs, with more people than usual and an international flavour.

The SydCSS meetup held the night before our Respond conference in Sydney in April was just such an event. One hundred and thirty of us turned up to the rather cool rooftop bar of the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel on a balmy Sydney early autumn evening, where we found a generous bar tab and regular rounds of tasty snacks circulating through the room. Classy, or what?

There was a real air of excitement as the usual buzz of friends and colleagues seeing each other was heightened (literally!) by the spectacular semi-outdoor setting, as well as the awareness that tonight would be graced by two major speakers from Respond.

Rachel Ilan Simpson is an American UX Designer based in Munich who works on the Chrome team for Google. Her Respond presentation was to be a version of a talk she’d originally created and presented with Guy Podjarnik, and this meetup would give her the chance to test some of the material solo with a live Australian audience.

The topic Rachel addressed was one with which developers and designers alike often struggle: finding the balance between website Usability and Security. Users want sites that can guarantee the security and safety of any information they provide, but they don’t want things to get in their way, like passwords.

Rachel took us through several aspects of the situation, looked at some of the core issues, made us cringe at some of the statistics and wince at some of the examples, and offered some ways all of this might be addressed. It was an excellent preview of her longer presentation at Respond itself.

The other main speaker was Russ Weakley, an Australian designer, front end developer and trainer based in Sydney who has built an international reputation not only as a CSS expert, but as someone who can make the often arcane world of stylesheets comprehensible even to beginners, while inspiring veterans to look at new ways of using CSS.

On this occasion, Russ took us into the world of CSS Property Values and the syntax required to use them properly. That might sound dry – but have you ever seen a Russ Weakley talk? Dry, it was not. He’s a very funny speaker who nonetheless has an excellent grasp of his subject, and that special knack of clarifying things that often look dauntingly complicated.

He even came up with a code puzzle for us to solve, with the winners taking home copies of the excellent Offscreen magazine.

Both speakers received a very warm reception from a knowledgeable crowd. The post-talk questions and answers were informed and technical, which helped to give the whole evening a comfortably techy feel.

As with most meetups, there were short announcements of local projects, opportunities, events and jobs, then a lot of chat until the food and drinks ran out. A top night out.

In Melbourne, a similar event took place the day after the conference, in the form of a mega meetup between the MelbCSS, MelbJS and BeResponsive groups. That time, Jen Simmons and Ryan Seddon spoke to another packed audience.

Wherever you are, whatever your specialties, it’s definitely worth searching out meetups in your area that focus on your interests – especially when they’re sponsored by Web Directions, and even more especially when it’s conference time.