WDYK Melbourne | web design & development tips and tricks

What Do You Know Melbourne — wrap-​​up

• By: Maxine
• Tweet: @maxine
• April 8, 2013

Last week was huge for Web Directions, as we backed up from our What Do You Know Brisbane event on Wednesday and headed straight for What Do You Know Melbourne on Thursday. It’s been great to share the “web design and development in 5 minutes” learning right across the east coast of Australia over the last couple of weeks, also hosting What Do You Know Sydney on the Thursday before Easter.

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!

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