Learn how to build high performance Internet and web applications with Node.js. In is session Tom Hughes-Croucher will demonstrate how to quickly build a high performance chat server using Node.js. This live coding exercise will provide a real insight into what it looks like to build a project in server-side Javascript. We will also cover how to deploy Node applications in production and look at just how far Node can really scale… A million connections and beyond? Tom Hughes-Croucher is the Chief Evangelist at Joyent, sponsors of the Node.js project. Tom mostly spends his days helping companies build really exciting projects with Node and seeing just how far it will scale. Tom is also the author of the O’Reilly book "Up and running with Node.js". Tom has worked for many well known organizations including Yahoo, NASA and Tesco. Follow Tom on Twitter: @sh1mmer Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Web Directions Podcast

Tom Hughes-Croucher - Up and Running with Node.js

HTML5 Video has been a hot topic for the last couple of years - but with new additions to the specification, we can now extend it beyond all recognition. In this session we’ll look at basic timed data, closed captioning and more - and as we adventure into more sophisticated uses of the technology, we’ll explore what additional value timed data can provide to your video, with attention paid to how you can implement it today. The key focuses of this session will be accessibility, searchable media, and enriching existing multimedia experiences with timed data, all with a liberal application of flashy eye-candy. And of course we’re using the freshly minted Timed Text Track specification, soon appearing in a browser near you! Christopher Giffard is a full stack web developer at the Department of Education, Employment, and Workplace Relations in Canberra. He’s somewhat new to the government, having a career background as a web guy in graphic design and advertising agencies - but hopes to bring a slice of that mad, informal world to the Australian public service. He gets a kick out of solving problems everybody else avoids, has a soft spot for architecture and design, is particularly interested in electronic music, and the algorithmic generation thereof. His current secret project involves natural language processing--and sarcasm detection. Follow Christopher on Twitter: @cgiffard Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Christopher Giffard - HTML5 Video, Captioning, and Timed Metadata

Learn how to build great looking and high performance mobile web applications leveraging CSS3 animations and Backbone.js, along with some cool use cases for geolocation and localStorage. This session will describe in length a boilerplate you can use for developing your own apps aimed at A grade mobile devices and tablets. Julio has been a full-stack software developer for the 12 years of his career, and during this time he went from being a GNU/Linux and Unix sysadmin, to a VoIP PBX architect, and finally a software developer. Since moving to Australia from Brazil, he has worked on startups and companies building software and at the same time, stuck his nose as much as he can into the human side of the software equation, understanding developer productivity, how software companies work, and product development. More recently he grew too interested in design for his own good, and began freelancing under the codename of Awesome By Design, writing a bunch of software which he open sourced on GitHub, giving presentations using his own presentation framework, and building software that not only does the job, but does so in style. Follow Julio on Twitter: @julio_ody Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Julio Cesar Ody - CSS3 and Backbone.js for killer mobile apps

The Australian War Memorial is connecting and enriching online archives and collections toward building a platform for telling history. Through Drupal 7 and Linked Data, the Memorial intends to develop tools that designers, researchers and historians can use to help find new ways of building historical narratives. During this session we will demonstrate some early prototypes and experiments, key uses of Linked Data, practical publishing tools and discuss how this work is unfolding inside one of Australia’s major collecting institutions. Adam Bell leads the web production team at the Australian War Memorial, where he works with curators and historians to publish the Memorial’s vast archives and collections online. He has a background as an artist, cultural worker, teacher and printmaker and plays in a rock n roll band. Follow Adam on Twitter: @bumphead David Peterson has been pushing at the boundaries of Web development since 1995; that combined with a background in wildlife cinematography brings fresh insight into what can be a geeky sort of space. He has built a number of high profile sites for the ABC, Australian science groups and many others. David works as a consultant with PreviousNext and lives way down south in cool Tasmania - regularly breathing on his fingers just to tap away at the keyboard. He is busy building Web apps built with Open Source toolkits utilising Java, PHP, Python, Linked Data and the almighty Drupal. He enjoys exploring deep into the guts of the Semantic Web and Linked Data to discover new connections and visualisations that help empower story tellers. Follow David on Twitter: @davidseth Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Adam Bell & David Peterson - Bringing History Alive: Telling stories with Linked Data and open source tools

WCAG2 is a long series of documents. Gian Wild knows this better than most: she spent six years on the W3C WCAG Working Group writing them. It’s a lot to ask that every developer and project manager read the complete guidelines, including informative content. However there are some very useful - and sometimes hidden - techniques in WCAG2. And some are even at Level AAA. Join Gian to find out what these are. Gian has worked in the accessibility industry since 1998 and consulted on the development of the first Level AAA accessible web site in Australia (Disability Information Victoria). She has worked with the Disability Services arm of the Victorian Government for over thirteen years to keep the four iterations of the Disability Services site (Disability Information Victoria, Disability Services, Disability Online and DiVine), Level AAA accessible. She ran the accessibility consultancy PurpleTop from 2000 to 2005 and built the accessibility tool, PurpleCop. Follow Gian on Twitter: @accessibilityoz Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Gian Wild - WCAG2 accessibility: the hidden nuggets

Mozilla is dedicated to ensuring that competition and innovation thrive on the Internet. In the last decade we rescued the Web from a near-monopoly and restored competition to the browser market. Now the standards-based Web platform is evolving rapidly - mostly in a good direction - and is defeating some of its competitors, such as proprietary browser plugins. However, it faces fresh challenges, in particular, single-vendor platforms for mobile devices that are attracting application developers away from the Web platform. In this talk I will describe the work we’re doing to ensure that the standards-based Web wins again - developing new technologies, extending Web standards, and shipping great products on all kinds of devices. I’ll talk about the challenges we face and what people who care about competition and freedom can do to help. Robert O’Callahan has been trying to save the world by contributing to Mozilla since 1999. In 2005 he left a career in computer science research at IBM to move back to New Zealand and work full-time for Mozilla, building up an Auckland development office (which is hiring!). He works on the Gecko engine that powers Firefox, focusing on layout, rendering, and media. He manages the video and media team, but prefers coding. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Robert O’Callahan - The Open Web Platform in the mobile era

The key idea of the Semantic Web is to make information on the Web easily consumable by machines. As machines start to understand web pages as sources of data that can be easily combined with other public data on the Web, the promise is that search on the Web will move well beyond the current paradigm of retrieving pages by keywords. Instead, search engines will start to answer complex queries based on the cumulative knowledge of the Web. In this presentation, we overview the basic set of technologies that can be used to annotate web pages so that they can be processed by data-aware search engines. In particular, we discuss the RDFa and microdata standards of the W3C designed for marking up data in HTML pages. We look at the ways in which this information is currently used by search engines, including the latest schema.org collaboration between Bing, Google, and Yahoo!, which provides a basic set of vocabulary items understood by all three major search engines on the Web. Peter Mika is a researcher and data architect at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, working on the applications of semantic technology to Web search. He received his BS in computer science from Eotvos Lorand University and his MSc and PhD in computer science (summa cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His interdisciplinary work in social networks and the Semantic Web earned him a Best Paper Award at the 2005 International Semantic Web Conference and a First Prize at the 2004 Semantic Web Challenge. From 2006 to 2009, he has been a co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge. Mika is the youngest member elected to the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. He is the author of the book ‘Social Networks and the Semantic Web’ (Springer, 2007). In 2008 he has been selected as one of "AI’s Ten to Watch" by the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal. Peter is a regular speaker at conferences. Follow Peter on Twitter: @pmika Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Peter Mika - Making the Web searchable

Augmented Reality lets you peel away the blinkers from your real world eyes to see the rich data and information that exists all around you. But up until now it has relied largely on proprietary tools and standards. Finally, we’re close to being able to augment our world using web technologies. Soon this will be a common part of the web browsing and mobile device experience. Now is the time to look at these future trends and the state of a specific list of API standardisation activities and the forces shaping them. We’ll also look at the current obstacles, risks and issues to explore what may prevent this landscape from evolving as it appears it will. This presentation aims to document the AR standardisation efforts over the last few years as well as what’s possible right now and in the near future from a distinctly web-based perspective. Rob is the Managing Director and co-founder of MOB, an innovative R&D lab based in Sydney. He regularly presents on mobile, AR and future technology developments. He is a co-founder of http://AR-UX.com & http://ARStandards.org and is an invited expert on the W3C’s Points of Interest Working Group. Rob is not just a spectator when it comes to the future of technology, he’s actively working to shape it. And he’s been doing this though building web based startups in Sydney since 1994. Follow Rob on Twitter: @nambor Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Rob Manson - Web standards based Augmented Reality

Computers are increasingly being held in the hand rather than sitting atop lap or desk. We now have to consider how our products will work underneath a finger instead of a mouse cursor. Increasingly, too, those products are being delivered as native applications, capable of fully exploiting device capabilities. That has ramifications not only for the way those projects get built, but also how we structure the businesses that support them. In this session, Michael Honey and Tim Riley answer the question 'web or native?' from business, product design and development perspectives. They cover the current state of web technology on modern devices and compare it to what’s available through native development platforms. They’ll look at web, native and hybrid strategies successfully employed by Australian and international businesses, and share their own stories as mobile and web developers. Finally, they’ll offer practical guidance on picking a strategy for web or native development that best suits your needs - as either a developer or a client. Tim and Michael are two of the partners behind Icelab, an Australian design and development studio. They’ve trod both the web and native paths through their client work, such as interactive touchscreens for museum exhibits, online photo galleries and mobile tour guides, and also their own projects, like Decaf Sucks, a coffee review community available on the web (optimised for both desktops and smartphones) and as a native iPhone app. Michael founded Icelab after a career as creative director and later, interactive director in an agency environment. He has fifteen years’ experience in design for screen, print, video and exhibition spaces, and has expertise in writing, programming, direction and post-production. He is an experienced coder, with a particular interest in algorithmic animation and datavisualisation. He is also experienced in the development of diagrammatic animations for cultural, engineering, scientific and architectural clients. Michael’s interests include architecture, urbanism, and the environment. Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelhoney Tim is a partner at Australian design and development studio Icelab, where he builds excellent web and mobile applications using Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Cocoa, and occasionally out of popsicle sticks. On alternate days he runs Decaf Sucks, an online community for coffee reviews, and RentMonkey, which contains the greatest on the Internet. Tim is an active participant in the Australian web and iOS communities, as a regular speaker at the Sydney Ruby on Rails meetings, organiser of the Canberra Ruby Crew, and part of the Canberra Cocoaheads chapter. Tim loves coffee and hates gluten. Follow Tim on Twitter: @timriley Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Michael Honey & Tim Riley - Web or native? Smart choices for smartphone apps

The application of web accessibility guidelines in a holistic manner across all roles of a web team continues to encounter resistance. This is often due to a lack of resources and knowledge, or no sense of relevancy in certain web roles. While there is solid support of the guidelines by accessibility activists and many front-end developers, a large percentage of other web practitioners in non-technical roles do not know how to integrate accessible design practices into their daily work, despite wanting to. By re-categorising accessibility guidelines into role-based groupings, such as visual design, content writing and information architecture, guidelines become more accessible to inexperienced web practitioners across a broad range of web roles. The application of accessibility guidelines then becomes more integrated and holistic, thereby reducing project timelines and costs while increasing the overall accessibility of a site from initial design stages. This method enables practitioners to apply skills specific to their role to a narrow range of accessibility guidelines particular to their area of expertise. For example, the visual designer would create a design and evaluate colour contrast before submitting the design to the development team. Likewise, an interaction designer would consult with the Javascript specialist to ensure the menu design satisfies relevant accessibility guidelines. Lisa is the Director and Principal Consultant at Scenario Seven, an Inclusive Design Consultancy based in Sydney. With 15 years experience on the web, the past 10 years of her work has centred on design research, usability, accessibility and inclusive strategies. Lisa is best known for her role based approach to web accessibility, which has seen the re-categorisation of WCAG checkpoints into a user-centred, practitioner-focused grouping for content developers, visual designers, developers and user experience professionals. Scenario Seven specialises in creating accessible, inclusive design strategies that integrate holistically with traditional user research practices. This includes anything from requirements gathering to the review of design documentation (functional specs, wireframes & visual designs), user research and WCAG compliance. We design for diversity. Follow Lisa on Twitter: @scenariogirl Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Lisa Herrod - Accessibility for web teams: Recategorising WCAG 2 using a role-based approach

Natalie and Simon launched the first version of Lanyrd.com while on honeymoon in Casablanca. As the site took off, they realised their side project was destined to become something much bigger. This talk will tell the story of Lanyrd, from a two-week proof of concept to a full-fledged startup via three intensive months of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. They’ll share the trials, tribulations and lessons they learned along the way. This is the talk they wish they’d heard before they got started! Natalie co-founded Lanyrd on her honeymoon with her husband Simon. Before co-founding a startup, she worked as a senior client-side engineer at Clearleft in Brighton, UK. Today, she juggles leading design, client-side engineering and UX on the project with building the company. If Natalie had any time for hobbies, she would enjoy pottery, yoga, writing and flying her kite. Follow Natalie on Twitter: @Natbat Simon is a co-founder of Lanyrd, and co-creator of the Django web framework. Prior to diving in to the world of entrepreneurship, Simon built crowdsourcing and database journalism projects for the Guardian newspaper in London. Simon is responsible for all of the server-side code on Lanyrd, unsurprisingly written with Django. He is also obsessed with Zeppelins, and hopes one day to build one. Follow Simon on Twitter: @simonw Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Natalie Downe & Simon Willison - Lanyrd: From side project to startup

Since the early days of the web, the only reliable way to get movement on your site was through Flash, or more recently, Javascript. But now, with WebKit and Mozilla leading the way, transformations and transitions can be done with pure CSS, even on mobile devices. And for those in need of even more movement, CSS3 provides for keyframe-based animations. In this session, we’ll take a look at all of the possibilities and explore what works and where - from the simplest effects, to creative usability enhancements including the combination of CSS with mobile Javascript frameworks. Greg Rewis is the Principal Evangelist for Adobe Systems, focusing on Adobe’s open web products and technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. With over 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends in excess of 200 days of the year on the road, talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at seminars, and speaking at industry conferences. Greg has been passionate about the web since putting his first "home page" online in 1994. His career has taken him around the world, from the early days of desktop publishing, to a start-up in Hamburg, Germany, the glory days of the web at Macromedia and finally his current role at Adobe. The original GoLive Cyberstudio Product Manager and former Dreamweaver Technical Product Manager, Greg is the co-author of "Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3" and "Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4" published by New Riders, as well as a regular contributor to industry publications. Follow Greg on Twitter: @garazi Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Greg Rewis - Move it! CSS3 Transitions and Animations

Change is never a smooth process. How do know when disruption is useful and how do you cope with the feedback on it? Recently news.com.au, a national news website with large numbers of daily visitors, underwent a major upgrade which tore down existing and perhaps "expected" ways of presenting news. At the heart of the redesign was a desire for change that motivated and challenged every aspect of the team’s design thinking and process. In this co-piloted session Simon and Scott will fly you over the territories of change they encountered on the project, ones common to many redesign projects. They’ll descend through the experiences that came out of the redesign: fundamentals like stakeholders, requirements and their process for user experience architect and designer working side by side. Sprinkled with some of the twitter and facebook feedback the project received, they’ll touch down on the sticky issues of dealing with feedback and how to suck it up and utilise passionate user and stakeholder feedback. Scott Bryant is a Senior Experience Architect working on online and cross platform news media and classifieds, most recently for news.com.au within the User Standards and Innovative Technology Team for News Digital Media. He spends his time working across product, design and technology teams utilising design and research to create engaging user experiences for news media. His career began as a visual artist before working in university and local government libraries, and finally into new media. He completed two Masters Degrees, in Media Art and Information Studies (while working as a Project Manager, Content Producer and IA). Upon returning from the US working on the Ask Jeeves innovative search interface he concentrated on User Experience, He continues to lecture casually in information and interaction design at the University of Technology, Sydney. Follow Scott on Twitter: @ScotTheLot Simon Wright is the Art Director of news.com.au, leading the design and front-end development team. He’s responsible for the brand’s design and development across all digital platforms, and also works closely with journalists on new ways to tell stories online. As someone who’s passionate about design, the web, media and well-designed chairs, being a part of a news website’s a near perfect fit (if it was possible to do this while climbing up a rockface, he’d never leave). In a previous life Simon was based in Perth and wore the many hats of small business, mostly the propeller-topped one of designer/front-end dev and sometimes the dull beige hat of The Guy Who Does The Finance. Follow Simon on Twitter: @diversionary Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Scott Bryant & Simon Wright - Designing for change and disruption

Let’s start with the assumption that computing and networking are as cheap to incorporate into product designs as plastic and aluminum. Anything can tweet, everything knows about everything. The cloud extends from smart speed bumps to exurban data systems, passing through us in the process. We’re basically there technologically today, and over the next [pick a date range] years, we’ll be there distribution-wise. Here’s the issue: now that we have this power what do we do with it? Yes we can now watch the latest movies on our phones while ignoring the rest of the world (if you believe telco ads) and know more about peripheral acquaintances than you ever wanted. But, really, is that it? Is it Angry Birds all the way down? Of course not. Every technology’s most profound social and cultural changes are invisible at the outset. Cheap information processing and networking technology is a brand new phenomenon, culturally speaking, and quickly changing the world in fundamental ways. Designers align the capabilities of a technology with people’s lives, so it is designers who have the power and responsibility to think about what this means. This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large. Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centered design of digital products. Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikekuniavsky Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Mike Kuniavsky - Design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computing

The Web is a purely magical substance that is built by us, web developers. How can it be that the web is totally technical, yet we all know some kids who we can call magicians of the Web. Some people believe that it’s all about skills, but Dmitry reckons it’s more about bravely, grit and a tiny bit of madness. Do you want to change the Web, not just build it? Do you want to know the secret spells? Do you want to know the source of all this unlimited power? Come and find out. Dmitry has over ten years experience in creating web applications. Having started as a back end developer, more recently he has changed his orientation to front end development and even pure design. He is the creator of Raphaël, the JavaScript Library that simplifies your work with vector graphics on the web, as well as a Optimus, the Microformats transformer. At any given moment he is always working on three secret projects, though no one knows where he gets the time for any of this. Follow Dmitry on Twitter: @DmitryBaranovsk Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Dmitry Baranovskiy - How to be a Web Sorcerer

Sessions from the Web Directions conference series. Sessions are © Web Directions and the respective speakers. See individual sessions for license details.

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Web Directions Podcast

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