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Web Directions Code – Melbourne

Mel­bourne, get your code on. Con­nect with the smartest people on the web and see what’s hap­pen­ing at the lead­ing edge of devel­op­ment. Join us for two in depth days of learn­ing and inspir­a­tion at the first ever Web Dir­ec­tions Code.

Day 1: HTML5

Paul Irish

Paul Irish is a front-end developer who loves the web. He is on Google Chrome’s Developer Rela­tions team as well as jQuery’s.

He devel­ops the HTML5 Boil­er­plate, the HTML5/CSS3 fea­ture detec­tion lib­rary Mod­ern­izr, CSS3 Please, and other bits and bobs of open source code. (Look in the sidebar)

He can tweet, IRC, pod­cast and blog, too.

Paul wants you to make really fuck­ing cool shit. Web sites, web apps, and games. Tell him what he can do to make it easier for you to build cool shit. For real.

I am not look­ing for a new pos­i­tion, but if you’re aching to read more.. here’s my resumé.

The Web Development Workflow of 2013

The chal­lenge for webapp developers is scal­ing the exper­i­ence to delight users, while sim­ul­tan­eously scal­ing the applic­a­tion code to provide speed, mod­u­lar­ity, and power. All the while, the cli­ent side costs per kilo­byte loom. In this talk, we dive into what com­prises the mod­ern webapp cli­ent side stack: tools, frame­works, and your applic­a­tion stack.

Divya Manian

Divya Manian is a Web Opener for Opera Soft­ware in Seattle. She made the jump from devel­op­ing device drivers for Motorola phones to design­ing web­sites and has not looked back since. She takes her duties as an Open Web vigil­ante ser­i­ously which has res­ul­ted in col­lab­or­at­ive pro­jects such as HTML5 Read­i­ness and HTML5 Boilerplate.

Designing in the browser

Each web­site is a product used daily by people to take actions, not just read the con­tent on it. Your product is amorph­ous, it takes the shape of whatever con­tainer it fills: a mobile browser, a touch enabled desktop browser, or a 30″ iMac that is con­nec­ted to the Inter­net via teth­er­ing. Pho­toshop is just one of the means to an end in this new age of util­it­arian web sites.

The new tech­no­lo­gies avail­able in HTML5 already allow you to cre­ate pro­to­types quickly in the browser. Learn how to cre­ate a pro­to­type from start to fin­ish using these new tech­no­lo­gies while tak­ing advant­age of quick pro­to­typ­ing tools.

John Allsopp

John All­sopp has spent more than 15 years devel­op­ing for the web, devel­op­ing soft­ware like the acclaimed CSS editor Style Mas­ter, and writ­ing and pub­lish­ing train­ing for web developers. John fre­quently speaks at con­fer­ences and deliv­ers work­shops around the world. He is a co-founder of the Web Dir­ec­tions con­fer­ences for web design­ers and developers, held on sev­eral con­tin­ents. In 1999, John wrote the still highly regarded Dao of Web Design and his Micro­formats: Empower­ing Your Markup for Web 2.0 was the first book pub­lished on micro­formats. He is also the author of Devel­op­ing with Web Stand­ards. When not bathed in the glow of vari­ous com­puter screens, he’s a volun­teer surf lifesaver and lives at the south­ern edge of Sydney with his wife and young daugh­ters, who are the light of his life.

Getting off(line): appcache, localStorage and more for faster apps that work offline

One of the per­ceived bene­fits of “nat­ive” apps is that they can be installed on a device, then run when the user isn’t con­nec­ted. But web apps can do this too.

In this ses­sion, John All­sopp will show you how to use HTML5 fea­tures such as app cache and web­Stor­age to cre­ate apps that the user can install, and which will work even when the user is cruis­ing at 30,000 feet with no web connection.

These fea­tures also have the added bonus of help­ing to improve the per­form­ance of web sites and apps as well, and even work in all mod­ern browsers and devices, includ­ing IE8 up!

Dave Johnson

Dave is a co-founder of Nitobi. He holds a BASc in Elec­trical Engin­eer­ing (UBC) and a PhD in Solid State Phys­ics from London’s Imper­ial Col­lege which both have pretty much noth­ing to do with mobile phones or soft­ware devel­op­ment. Dave spends most of his time work­ing on and talk­ing about the PhoneGap project.

Device APIs-closing the gap between native and web

Where once web pages were sand­boxed, with little if any access to the under­ly­ing device cap­ab­il­it­ies, increas­ingly, this is no longer the case.

From the first steps of geo­loca­tion, which enables any web site or applic­a­tion to ask the browser for a user’s loc­a­tion, an increas­ing range of device fea­tures are beging exposed in the DOM: the file sys­tem, cam­era, gyrosopes, address book, com­passes and more.

In this ses­sion, Dave John­son, ori­gin­ator of the phoneGap pro­ject delves into HTML5 and related device APIs, enabling us to build richer, more soph­s­it­cated applic­a­tions in the browser.

Damon Oehlman

Damon Oehl­man is an exper­i­enced web and mobile applic­a­tions developer. He has worked with small and large com­pan­ies to develop soft­ware solu­tions for desktop, web and most recently mobile devices. His first tech­nical book, Pro Android Web Apps, was released earlier this year by Apress. Damon cur­rently runs his own soft­ware devel­op­ment and con­sult­ing firm Side­lab, which spe­cial­izes in cross-​​platform mobile solu­tions. Damon’s aptly titled tech blog Dis­tract­able offers a mix of art­icles, tutori­als and other shiny things. He is a proud dad, hus­band and one day dreams of own­ing his own under­ground lair.

HTML5 Messaging

As browser tech­no­lo­gies become more soph­ist­ic­ated, increas­ingly the logic of web applic­a­tions is mov­ing into the browser itself. Just as XML­Ht­tpRe­quest and COMET mes­saging ini­ti­ated the Ajax revolu­tion, new mes­saging tech­no­lo­gies like web­sock­ets and web intents prom­ise another level of soph­ist­ic­a­tion for web applications.

Come and hear how these tech­no­lo­gies can help you cre­ate more power­ful desktop and mobile web applic­a­tions with HTML5’s new mes­saging features.

Silvia Pfeiffer

Silvia is an open video tech­no­logy enthu­si­ast with a long back­ground in open source soft­ware, media tech­no­logy research and devel­op­ment, and in open stand­ards. She has a PhD in audio and video con­tent ana­lysis, has worked with research insti­tutes, star­ted her own video tech­no­logy com­pany, is a freel­ance Web and stand­ards developer, and is cur­rently a Google con­tractor work­ing on W3C video stand­ards and Google video tech­no­logy. She has been one of the key drivers of video access­ib­il­ity spe­cific­a­tions in HTML5 and the author of “The Defin­it­ive Guide to HTML5 Video”.

Implementing Video Conferencing in HTML5

Recently, a new spe­cific­a­tion was pro­posed that extends HTML5 with real-time com­mu­nic­a­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies. Web developers will be able to imple­ment video con­fer­en­cing in Web pages with just a few lines of JavaS­cript code. The Medi­aStream and Peer­Con­nec­tion objects provide some­thing fun­da­ment­ally dif­fer­ent from the tra­di­tional web: peer-to-peer con­nec­tions without an inter­me­di­ate relay. This present­a­tion will explain the new objects and show a demo of its imple­ment­a­tion in the Chrome Web browser.

Anson Parker

Anson Parker is a web developer based in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia. His past has included stints at Optus and News Lim­ited in Sydney, as well as a couple of years with a tech start-up in San Fran­cisco. Over that time he has moved from design to pro­gram­ming to product devel­op­ment. He is the man behind the domain name search engine Dom­ize and plans on launch­ing an auto­mot­ive search engine in 2012.

The HTML5 History API: PushState or bust!

Get the low-down on this excel­lent HTML5 fea­ture and learn how you can add it to your own web pro­jects (and why you’d want to!). We’ll also look at some of the mis-steps made along the way (like the 2011/12 Twit­ter web interface).

Andrew Fisher

Andrew Fisher is deeply pas­sion­ate about tech­no­logy and is con­stantly tinker­ing with and break­ing some­thing — whether it’s a new applic­a­tion for mobile com­put­ing, build­ing a robot, deploy­ing a cloud or just play­ing around with web tech. Some­times he does some real work too and has been involved in devel­op­ing digital solu­tions for busi­nesses since the dawn of the web in Aus­tralia and Europe for brands like Nin­tendo, people­sound, Sony, Mit­subishi, Sports­girl and the Mel­bourne Cup.

Andrew is the CTO for JBA Digital, a data agency in Mel­bourne Aus­tralia, where he focuses on cre­at­ing mean­ing out of large, chan­ging data sets for cli­ents. Andrew is also the founder of Rocket Mel­bourne, a star­tup tech­no­logy lab explor­ing phys­ical com­put­ing and the Web of Things.

Getting all touchy feely with the mobile web

As the major­ity of web users shift to touch devices, the expect­a­tion is becom­ing that everything becomes touch­able — includ­ing the mobile web. This ses­sion will provide a prac­tical and prag­matic view of where touch is at from a web stand­ards per­spect­ive and how you can start weav­ing touch inter­ac­tions into your mobile web applications.

Day 2: JavaScript

Rob Hawkes

Rob thrives on solv­ing prob­lems through code. He has an addic­tion to visual pro­gram­ming and can’t get enough of HTML5 and JavaS­cript. He’s the author of Found­a­tion HTML5 Can­vas and is a Tech­nical Evan­gel­ist at Moz­illa. He leads the gam­ing side of Mozilla’s work within the developer community.

HTML5 technologies and game development

With Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and other block­buster games now work­ing in mod­ern web browsers, it’s fair to say nat­ive, browser based gam­ing has arrived for real. But how do they do it? In the ses­sions, Moz­illa Tech­nical Evan­gel­ist Rob Hawkes looks at the fea­tures now in your browsers to help develop games (and other inter­act­ive web based exper­i­ences) includ­ing the Can­vas and WebGL, HTML5 Audio API, Mouse­lock and the Joy­stick API.

Jed Schmidt

Jed Schmidt is a JavaS­cript developer based in Tokyo, and has been using node.js since just before its debut in 2009. He main­tains a vari­ety of open-source JavaS­cript lib­rar­ies (includ­ing a DynamoDB cli­ent, Chrome exten­sion packer, and OAuth2 login aggreg­ator), and has built sev­eral fun pro­jects on node.js, includ­ing 140byt.es, a tweet-sized code golf­ing con­test, and Ramendan, a gruel­ing month-long test of ramen devotion.

NPM: Node’s Personal Manservant

In just 30 months, node.js has gone from an obscure toy to the most watched devel­op­ment plat­form on Git­Hub. Once the next stable ver­sion ships, sig­ni­fic­ant focus will move to improv­ing the community-driven eco­sys­tem of mod­ules, mak­ing it easier to nav­ig­ate and con­trib­ute.

In this talk, Jed will intro­duce the two faces of NPM, the offi­cial node.js pack­age man­ager: NPM the eco­sys­tem, for find­ing exist­ing mod­ules and devel­op­ing and pub­lish­ing your own mod­ules, and NPM the tool, for man­aging and stream­lin­ing node.js work­flows for your own projects.

Ryan Seddon

Ryan Sed­don is a Senior Front-end Developer from Mel­bourne Aus­tralia who has an unnat­ural obses­sion with JavaS­cript and the many places it runs. He also loves to tinker with any new web tech­no­logy he can get his hands on and loves diving into specs and code to fig­ure out more.

In his spare time he’s either play­ing bas­ket­ball, writ­ing for his blog thecssninja.com or com­mit­ting code to github.

Debugging secrets for the lazy developer

Client-side unit test­ing can be a pain­ful thing to test in all browsers, so as a “lazy developer” I like to do as little as pos­sible. We’ll dive into how we can auto­mate this pro­cess and what tools are out there to help us and how I use these on Modernizr.

Jared Wyles

Jared is a senior soft­ware engin­eer hav­ing recently taken over reigns of the fron­tend at big com­merce. He has done a stint with Atlas­sian and digital agen­cies work­ing with the web for the past 5 years. When not work­ing, he can usu­ally be found drink­ing some­where rant­ing about the cur­rent state of web applic­a­tions or web stand­ards to who­ever will listen, and in front of whatever con­fer­ence will have his rants on the import­ance of performance.

Removing the gag from your browser

Before we fork out for expens­ive per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing tools What if we took the time to listen to what our browser was try­ing to tell us? We can dis­cover a whole range of fea­tures you may have ignored. Dis­cover how to debug net­work latency issues, memory leaks and other per­form­ance fun in our browsers. With web applic­a­tions becom­ing more like desktop apps, remain­ing open for days at a time. Now is the time to listen to your browsers pain and walk away with a new toolkit of per­form­ance best practices.

Mark Dalgleish

Mark Dalgleish works as a front-end developer in Mel­bourne. He’s obsessed with everything web and loves using JavaS­cript, CSS and HTML to cre­ate rich exper­i­ences that res­on­ate with end users. In his spare time, he loves exper­i­ment­ing with the latest web tech­no­lo­gies and shar­ing pro­jects online.

Getting Closure

An in-depth look at how JavaScript’s first-class func­tions and lex­ical scope allow us to write power­ful and express­ive code.

Tony Milne

Tony is a co-founder of Inlight Media, a lead­ing Mel­bourne web and mobile devel­op­ment com­pany who spe­cial­ise in Node.js backed iOS/web pro­jects. When Tony fills in his census sur­vey answers, JavaS­cript is his nat­ive lan­guage. Tony helps organ­ise and reg­u­larly attends Mel­bJS (a Mel­bourne JavaS­cript group) and the Mel­bourne Node.js meet-up, so you can come along, hang out and drink a beer with him there.

Party like it’s 1999, write JavaScript like it’s 2012!

This 15 minute party may or may not include: when and how to load and run JavaS­cript on page load; JavaS­cript cod­ing con­ven­tions you should adopt; a look at writ­ing call­back ori­ented JavaS­cript and some JavaS­cript per­form­ance tips for fun and profit.

Tim Oxley

Tim works primar­ily on the NodeJS plat­form, build­ing light­weight data and inter­con­nectiv­ity ser­vices for busi­ness. Since leap­ing from Flash’s burn­ing car­cass, Tim has been hon­ing his skills as a pro­fes­sional JavaS­cript developer while cham­pi­on­ing pro­fes­sional pro­gram­ming prac­tices as a con­sult­ant in Aus­tralia and worldwide.

Clientside templates for reactive UI

Today’s web browser is a power­ful applic­a­tion plat­form, chal­len­ging the tra­di­tional respons­ib­il­it­ies of web applic­a­tion server and cli­ent. In this ses­sion we learn to har­ness the browser to do some of the heavy-lifting tra­di­tion­ally del­eg­ated to the server-side.

Push­ing ren­der­ing tasks onto the web browser reduces the amount of hand-holding required of a server, min­im­ising net­work util­isa­tion and lag involved in user inter­ac­tions. This decouples our views from our server imple­ment­a­tion and can improve over­all applic­a­tion per­form­ance. Your web applic­a­tions will feel snappy and light­weight, present­ing a more pleas­ant user experience.

We will explore the implic­a­tions of client-side ren­der­ing and the dif­fer­ences between pop­u­lar client-side tem­plat­ing tools, such as jQuery tem­plates, EJS, Under­score and Handle­bars, eval­u­at­ing com­pat­ib­il­ity, per­form­ance, express­ive­ness and pro­ject health, while com­par­ing stat­ist­ics and user exper­i­ence with tra­di­tional server-side tem­plat­ing techniques.

Damon Oehlman

Damon Oehl­man is an exper­i­enced web and mobile applic­a­tions developer. He has worked with small and large com­pan­ies to develop soft­ware solu­tions for desktop, web and most recently mobile devices. His first tech­nical book, Pro Android Web Apps, was released earlier this year by Apress. Damon cur­rently runs his own soft­ware devel­op­ment and con­sult­ing firm Side­lab, which spe­cial­izes in cross-​​platform mobile solu­tions. Damon’s aptly titled tech blog Dis­tract­able offers a mix of art­icles, tutori­als and other shiny things. He is a proud dad, hus­band and one day dreams of own­ing his own under­ground lair.

The main event: beyond event listeners

Stuck in the land of DOM-based event hand­ling in your JS code? While jQuery (and other lib­rar­ies) help ease the pain, they don’t solve all the prob­lems.

This ses­sion will explore mod­ern JS event lib­rar­ies that will change the way you archi­tect and build your apps forever.

Program

Two full days of all you can eat HTML5 and JavaS­cript goodness.

You can down­load this sched­ule dir­ectly into a schedul­ing applic­a­tion like iCal or Out­look. But of course, you don’t need to do this — you’ll get a copy of the sched­ule at the conference.

Wed­nes­day, May 23 2012

TimeSes­sions08:01–09:00Regis­tra­tion09:00–09:15Open­ing Comments09:15–10:10The Web Devel­op­ment Work­flow of 2013 with Paul Irish10:10–10:40Morn­ing tea10:40–11:30Device APIs-closing the gap between nat­ive and web with Dave John­son11:30–12:20HTML5 Mes­saging with Damon Oehl­man12:20–13:20Lunch13:20–13:40The HTML5 His­tory API: Push­State or bust! with Anson Parker13:40–14:00Imple­ment­ing Video Con­fer­en­cing in HTML5 with Silvia Pfeif­fer14:00–14:20Get­ting all touchy feely with the mobile web with Andrew Fisher14:20–14:40To be announced14:40–15:00To be announced15:00–15:30After­noon tea15:30–16:20Get­ting off(line): appcache, loc­al­Stor­age and more for faster apps that work off­line with John All­sopp16:20–17:15Design­ing in the browser with Divya Manian17:15–17:25Day 1 Clos­ing Comments

Thursday, May 24 2012

TimeSes­sions09:00–09:10Day 2 Open­ing comments09:10–10:05HTML5 tech­no­lo­gies and game devel­op­ment with Rob Hawkes10:05–10:35Morn­ing tea10:35–11:25NPM: Node’s Per­sonal Manser­vant with Jed Schmidt11:25–12:15Remov­ing the gag from your browser with Jared Wyles12:15–13:15Lunch13:15–13:35Party like it’s 1999, write JavaS­cript like it’s 2012! with Tony Milne13:35–13:55The main event: bey­ond event listen­ers with Damon Oehl­man13:55–14:15Get­ting Clos­ure with Mark Dalgleish14:15–14:35Debug­ging secrets for the lazy developer with Ryan Sed­don14:35–14:55To be announced14:55–15:25After­noon tea15:25–16:15Cli­ent­side tem­plates for react­ive UI with Tim Oxley16:15–17:10To be announced17:10–17:30Clos­ing Comments

Venue

Web Dir­ec­tions Code will be held on Level 17 at The RACV City Club at 501 Bourke St in Mel­bourne CBD.

Accom­mod­a­tion options

Trav­el­ing from out of town on a budget? We’ve pulled together a bunch of cheap and cheer­ful options for accom­mod­a­tion and put them on a map for you. Check out Wotif as well. We also have spe­cial rates at the RACV itself. If you want to treat your­self and stay at the con­fer­ence venue just give them a call and let them know the event you’re attend­ing, and you will get the dis­count rate of $255 per night.

Eat­ing and drinking

Attend­ing a con­fer­ence like Web Dir­ec­tions Code is a whole lot more than what hap­pens from 9 to 5, and Mel­bourne has count­less great places to grab a drink or a meal at any hour of the night or day. Impress your new friends by tak­ing them to one of the awe­some places on our map. And Mel­bourne people, don’t hold back with shar­ing any awe­some hid­den gems we don’t know about!

Pricing

As well as fea­tur­ing the most inter­est­ing people present­ing their most up to the minute ideas, Web Dir­ec­tions Code is fully catered, with social events galore. You won’t find bet­ter value any­where for an event like this.

Been to a pre­vi­ous Web Dir­ec­tions event? We’d love to see you back again: please get in touch if you did not receive your emailed dis­count code.

TicketDates & AvailabilityPriceEarly BirdMarch 5th to March 31st$799Middle BirdApril 1st to May 1st$899Late BirdMay 2nd to May 23rd$999

Fine Print

All the prices lis­ted on this page are in Aus­tralian Dol­lars. Prior to the event, con­fer­ence and work­shop tick­ets may be trans­ferred at no cost, and can­celled with a 10% hand­ling cost.

Con­fer­ence

Con­fer­ence regis­tra­tion includes:

• Attend­ance at every ses­sion of Web Dir­ec­tions Code (May 23rd & 24th)
• Catered morn­ing and after­noon tea breaks and lunch
• Drinks and net­work­ing recep­tion on the even­ing of the 23rd
• Clos­ing night party on Thursday May 24th

We all know that 50% of the good­ness of being at an event hap­pens after hours. Amaz­ing present­a­tions are crit­ical so we put a lot of time into cur­at­ing a pro­gram that is right on the mark. But this is noth­ing without oppor­tun­it­ies to con­nect with other attendees and dis­cuss what you’ve seen and heard.

There’ll be an offi­cial open­ing night drinks on Wed­nes­day the 23rd, as well a clos­ing night party on the even­ing of Thursday the 24th, so make sure you put these in the diary. As well as this, Web Dir­ec­tions Code is fully catered for morn­ing and after­noon tea, as well as lunch on both days. So, you’re going to have to work real hard to find time to check out all these awe­some Mel­bourne drink­ing holes and eat­er­ies.

Are you up for the challenge?

Web Dir­ec­tions Code is brought to you by Web Dir­ec­tions — find out more about us, and our other events past and future.

Con­tact us

We want to hear from you — we really do! You know the abso­lute best­est way to get in touch and get a fast reply? Shoot us a mes­sage with the form below.

First, what’s your name:

Your email address:

What are you con­tact­ing us about:

And what’s your ques­tion / con­cern:

Got some­thing you want to call us about? We’re not always in the office, so that form above really is the best way to get through. But if you really want to pick up the phone, we’re at +61 2 9043 6797. Oh, and we accept faxes too — send them to + 61 2 8088 3835.