WDCNZ schedule
Thursday 14th July 2011
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Opening
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The Developer Experience
by Pamela Fox
We all know what “user experience” is and we know that it’s important. We analyze drop-off rates for sign-in flows, do A/B testing on color schemes, and organize user focus groups for new features. But we rarely talk about the “developer experience” - what we all go through each time we try to use a developer tool, library, or API. How do we decide what tool to use? Is it easy to integrate with our development environment? How flexible is the API? Where do we go when something goes wrong? Those are the sort of questions that we can ask to understand what it’s like for a developer to use a product - and where it can be improved.
Whether you simply use developer products or you actually build one yourself, you should walk away from this talk with ideas on how to make a great developer experience - and why it matters.
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SilverStripe: do we really need another framework?
by Sam Minnée
We have come a long way as a profession since 1999. Aspiring web developers have a variety of excellent tools they could choose to use to build their next project. SilverStripe is our contribution to this embarrassment of riches, and with version 3 we're releasing SilverStripe Framework as well as SilverStripe CMS. Why bother? Aren't there enough options already?
In my talk on Thursday I will explain where SilverStripe came from, and where I see it as being of most use to you. I'll talk about some of the cool stuff you can do with it today, and some of the cool stuff we are working on right now for SilverStripe 3.
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Preparation H
by Jef Weg
"CSS sucks! Can we please go back to intuitive tables?" - Anonymous developer
"Why does CSS make me want to kill myself? How do I make it OBEY me?" - Anonymous aspiring dictator
"I'm having a bad day. CSS ate my brains." - Anonymous zombie
CSS may seem unreliable, but actually it's just a bit dumb. We'll take a look at the dumbest bits of CSS, and we'll check out CSS's optional, shiny new brain, SASS and Compass.
Coming to this talk might make you better at CSS. It might also make you smarter, sexier and funnier at parties.
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How Rails Won the Framework Wars
In the 7 years since Ruby on Rails was first released it has grown from a small framework built on an obscure japanese language to the default choice for most well-informed web developers today.
Ruby on Rails Core Team member Michael Koziarski will cover a brief history of Rails, it's key features and why you should probably be using it instead of whatever tool you currently use. -
WebSockets.open()
by Jeremy Boyd
HTML5 Web Sockets provide full-duplex communication superseding the traditional polling, streaming or plug-in based alternatives. The goal is pretty clear - a highly scalable and highly responsive mechanism for two way communication. We will have a look at the current state of play both from a browser perspective and what support exists at the server plus play around with some examples which highlight why this is likely to be very useful for you to know about.
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Mobile Panel (Web vs Native)
by Layton Duncan, Karl von Randow, James Pearce and Nigel Parker
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HTML5 for Humans
by Paul Irish
Paul will cover our current available feature set in HTML5, CSS3 and other other fun shiny toys. He'll discuss where we are with browser adoption and dig into the best ways to enhance user experiences through these features today. Paul will take a practical and cross-browser friendly approach that covers all browsers and reviews topics like feature detection, polyfills, and page performance.
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HTML Media: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go
by Nigel Parker and Chris Double
Modern browsers both on the desktop and on mobile devices support HTML Media. Chirs Double works for Mozilla and focuses on HTML Media, Nigel Parker works for Microsoft and is experienced in working with broadcast media on the web and more recently HTML Media. Together Chris and Nigel will take you through how you can leverage HTML Media in todays web applications and talk about what is coming next.
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Live Coding Asp.Net MVC3
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Web Security - Get ahead (er)
by Kirk Jackson
The internet moves fast, browsers change, and keeping your website safe is a continuing process. What are the latest things you should be doing?
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The forgotten art of Web Performance
by John Clegg
We all _know_ that web performance is important. We all want fast broadband, right? What if I told you we can make our websites twice as fast NOW!?!? In this session, John is going to look at some key principles behind web performance that seem to have been forgotten by web developers these days. John will show you some tricks to make your website "Fast by default!".
Also, John will tell us the current state of Web performance in New Zealand. John has been following how fast NZ websites are over the last 3 years. He'll tell us, what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong and how we can fix it.
In a previous life, John was CTO of Indian online auction websites Bidorbuy.co.in and Baazee.com. He learnt how important web performance was for the business and how to make small changes made a big difference to the bottom line.
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Apocalypse Node
by Craig Walker
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to write JavaScript on the server? No?!? Well - doesn't matter because that's what I'm talking about anyway. But while server-side JS is awesome, Node is a lot more than that and I will introduce you to the impending apocalypse to all other server-side platforms that is Node (actually it's probably not - but Node is cool and new and as web developers we love shiny things).
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I want a pony - why Python & Django will make your next web app rock
by Rob Coup
Using Django, you can build and maintain high-quality Web applications with minimal fuss. Just like Rails. And symfony. So why learn Python? And what makes Django different from other web frameworks?
We'll go through the practical reasons you should use Python and Django - especially in the real world where everything doesn't start with a clean-slate. And then we'll examine a simple, real, Django application (no, not a blog).
Rob is an experienced Python-wrangler, knows far too much about Django, and contributes to a pile of Open Source projects. He's the technical founder at local (Python-driven) startup Koordinates
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Building rich mobile apps with the modern web stack
by James Pearce
The web is always evolving, but we're living though a particularly important architectural shift - as services migrate to the cloud, business logic moves to thicker browser runtimes, and the web escapes from desktop hardware to become a beautifully mobile medium.
In this environment, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript provide everything you need to building rich applications. We can either carry on talking about "web vs native" or we can just build cool stuff.
Let's do it.
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Closing
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Xero After Party
With live performance from Minuit
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