Web Directions North » Birds of a Feather

This year, we’ve added birds of a feather sessions at each lunch. You are free to participate, or not, entirely up to you.

Here’s how it works. At the entry to the lunch room, you’ll find a list of the topics for that session. You’ll find a description of each below. Just find the table where the session you want to attend is on, and say hi.

Each session has an facilitator, whose role is to help the discussion flow. There’ll be a whiteboard or flipcharts at each table if you want to use those.

Here’s the lineup of birds of a feather session for Web Directions North 08.

Wednesday

1 year ago: from unemployed to Web Developer at Yahoo!

Klaus Komenda

Description

This highly relates to me and has, in contrast to some other technical presentations throughout the conference, a highly social aspect to it.

What I would like to tell people in this presentation is how I came to WDN last year, unemployed, and how, from this point on, I made it to become a Web Dev at one of the most successful internet companies and being part of a Frontend Developer team which is most likely the best in Britain, if not in Europe.

I figure that this might be interesting to people who are also looking for new opportunities, so I would like to cover: - my strategy how to find the job that you really want in the web industry as a frontend developer and what I subsequently did to make employers become interested in me (my blog, CV, job boards like authenticjobs.com etc.) - how attending WDN helped me (in a way) to get the job at Yahoo!

As said, some people coming to WDN might be looking for new career opportunities (or might even be unemployed as I was 1 year ago) and might be interested how I tackled this challange.

PS: This is not meant as an advertising topic by telling people how great Yahoo! is. I am totally not speaking on behalf of Yahoo! but rather stating my own opinions and telling my own little story :-)

Large scale CSS Frameworks

Tom Cartwright and Richard Northover

Description

Large scale CSS Frameworks: stairway to heaven or highway to hell? - to grid or not to grid? Does the whole idea go against basic semantic HTML? - do frameworks save time and effort in the long-run? - how the hell do you maintain a set of central CSS files in a huge organisation?

Ambient Personalisation

Seamus Leahy

Description

The organization of content on a website has been a large topic since the beginning of the web. A lot of thought (hopefully) is put into with resulting Information Architecture diagrams etc. But what if instead an underlying system would rearrange the structure of the content based upon how people used the website.

Selling Web Standards

Andrew Pritchard

Description

I’d love to hear thoughts from others about how they approach selling standards-based solutions to managers and decision-makers (especially at smaller companies) who in many cases just don’t care and glaze over at the merest hint of technical jargon.

Progressive Enhancement

Tim Wright

Description

How developers are dealing with IE6 users and browser compatibilities while still integrating newer coding techniques, and making sure they degrade gracefully.

Web standards in K-12/Secondary and Teritiary Education - is there a way?

Matt Harris

Description

The goal being to have a good chat about ways of educating and ensuring tomorrows web developers start off with the best practices.

Thursday

CMS + web standards

Miyuki Fukuma

Description

How much standards compliance, usability, and accessibility can you expect to achieve with a website built using a CMS, by people who have no concept of any of the above, and can’t realistically afford to be educated about the above either?

Security 2.0

Scott Baldwin

Description

I’m interested in Security. Not only the good old fasion XSS, XSRF, and SQL Injection, but also what new vulnerabilities that are created by Ajax / Silverlight etc… especailly as the web bocomes more linked up, and we are logged in permenantly to our favourite Web 2.0 applications.

Doing it all yourself: being a Jack or Jill of all web trades

Ricky Onsman

Description

At each of the WD conferences and their predecessors, I’ve met people who are like myself: solo freelance operators who take on a range of web design and development projects and use whatever technologies work for each project. There is no Mac v PC argument, no client-side v server-side, no Firefox v IE, no dynamic v static, no ideological position on Flash, php, ColdFusion, Javascript, CSS, tables - just a mad drive to use whatever delivers the outcome the client wants. There’s also no graphic designer, no coding specialist, no database wizard, no style guru, no client liaison manager, no team. Sometimes that means learning only bits of a range of disciplines. Often it means wrestling with previously unfamiliar concepts. Always it means keeping on top of industry trends, if only to explain to a client why it may or not be right for them. How do we do it?

Where do the browser and the desktop meet?

Ryan Stewart

Description

There’s so much going on inside the browser and lately we’ve seen an increased interest in the desktop as well. As applications and the web evolve, where do we draw the line for desktop applications and browser applications? Is there even a line? Will we think back to the notion of “browser applications” and “desktop applications” as silly?

Front-end Certification

Tyler Roehmholdt

Description

What is the importance of having a professional front-end certification and why is one necessary? What constitutes “front end” in terms of knowledge and technology, and how do these translate into certifiable measurements? We’ll also take a look at the efforts of Peter-Paul Koch and how his work in the Netherlands can inspire others.

Putting Sharepoint on a Diet

Mark Simonds

Description

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a robust system for creating sites of any scale. Unfortunately, out of the box MOSS assumes you are building an Intranet to be viewed only with IE. Let’s discuss methods for getting MOSS sites to trim a few pounds off the front-end code as well as ensuring an identical cross-browser experience that conforms to web standards.