What Do You Know Melbourne - wrap-up

What Do You Know Melbourne — wrap-​​up

• By: Maxine
• Tweet: @maxine
• September 11, 2013

The morning after What Do You Know Canberra, John and I and Damon were straight on a plane for the slightly cooler climes of Melbourne, where on Thursday night we had quite the line up of presentations. From memory, I think the first ever What Do You Know was in fact in Melbourne, around two years ago, and let’s just say the event has really hit its stride in this location. What a great evening last Thursday was! Big thanks to all the presenters and attendees for creating such an unbeatable atmosphere.

It’s always tough to go first, but Ben Birch did a pretty terrific job of the old “Build an App in 5 Mins” trick to get us all started. Ben presentation was all live coding, but he sent me through a link to the PhoneGap CLI documentation for anyone who wants more information.

Next we had Kelsey Schwenk who showed us What Data Can (and Can’t) Tell You. Analytics can be daunting to jump into — the thinking in this short presentation isn’t a bad place to start though!

Then John Barton talked us though his experiences with developing a product (Goodfilms), as opposed to project work (Codename​.io) in Projects vs Products.

Ben Teese wants us to know that Backbone is Not Enough — Ben did a comprehensive write-​​up of his presentation so do check it out.

Just before the break we had Sally Bieleny let us know that “It’s not about me” — a lesson in empathy we can all listen to!

After the break, with drinks and food courtesy of SilverStripe, Damon Oehlman showed us how to Ride the Web RTC Wave, And Not Drown in the Swell. WebRTC is both cool and hot, once you have checked out What is WebRTC, get ready to dive into the spec to really see what is happening in the space. And for a bit of fun and just one idea of the possibilities in this exciting area, check out John’s tutorial Build a motion activated security camera, with WebRTC, canvas and Device Orientation.

Then Brendan Graetz told us all about Digest Cycles in Single Page Apps, well, at least as much as you can say in 5 minutes! He too has written a blog post about the presentation, so dive in!

Next up was the inimitable Tref Gare, with “And lo, there will be no slides”. This was awesome. Sorry, no slides or links though, you really had to be there — make sure you come along next time!

Sebastian Porto gave us a whirlwind tour of Go, and let us know why he thinks it is such a great language for modern web apps. For more check out Learn X in Y minutes, Where X=Go and Go By Example.

Then to close out the night we finally got Pat Allan to present at a What Do You Know! Pat has been such a stalwart at all the Melbourne What Do You Know nights, indispensible as our stage manager, so I was super excited to finally convince him to present “Refactoring Community” for this edition of the show. You can see a video of this very heart warming and inspirational presentation, which was recorded at Ruby Conf AU earlier this year.

What Do You Know was over but I wasn’t quite done with Melbourne yet. I stuck around for Friday night as well and went to the launch of Issue 6 of Offscreen Magazine, which was a really lovely night. Kai Brach gave a beautiful and heartfelt presentation about everything that has gone into Offscreen, which had some particularly salient points about defining your own success and doing something you love. Again, you really should have been there :), but if you weren’t, get yourself a copy of this latest issue and see what it’s all about.

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