Sessions at BACON 2012 on Friday 20th April

As developers, we spend a lot of time tinkering with techniques and processes for creating better technology. But, how often do we think about the soul of our technology? Perhaps the secret to success can be revealed by understanding the mysteries of people who make it, their values and identities, loves and fears, and the narratives that tell the story of their lives.

Almost every week I end up tinkering with something and creating myself some thing I think is cool. Some people say I have to much time on my hands. Others simply don't understand why I do it. The beauty of the web is it is relatively cheap to make stuff. Let me explain to you why I do it. And why I think it is important to do it.

Having your very own robot butler is finally possible! HUBOT from GitHub is an easy to setup and highly extensible automation assistant for your everyday needs. Use HUBOT to order food, grab directions, deploy code, and even open the door! Sure, he may take over the world someday, but in the meantime we might as well have some fun.

Hubot is written in coffeescript on Node.js and easily runs on Heroku and connects to many communication platforms including Campfire, HipChat, any XMPP server, and Twitter.

Whether you’re a designer or a developer there’s a simple way to get better at both, help others around you improve, and make working together more enjoyable. The power of design pairing can produce better ideas faster and instill greater empathy for both design and programming throughout your company.

Samuel Bowles will explore how his team has adopted the principles of design pairing in a number of contexts and configurations. His observations are based on the contrast between his work in traditional design firms and as a member of various Agile development teams. He will explore the various types of design pairing and especially the power of cross-functional pairing.

A guided tour of a man careering through his musical life, from hacking to indie development, vintage computers to inspiring the next generation of coders. This talk explores where video games can take you.

Software marches forward; each new piece is better than the last! Not quite... it's a bit more subtle than that. There are patterns in the history of our industry: each tool or practice is a reaction to something before it. By paying attention to the pattern, and to the types of reactions, we can better understand our history and our current tools' place in it. More importantly, we can avoid repeating the mistaken reactions that our predecessors have had to new tools (C is too slow for real software!)

With the increasing popularity of Google's Chrome, the battle for web browser market share is tougher than ever. This battle not only affects earnest developers on the front line, but also many innocent surfing civilians. It is with this in mind that my talk would humorously compare the current and future state of modern browsers to the global conflict of 1939-45.

In my presentation, I will discuss various browsers by likening them to counties who participated in World War II - The Allies, made up of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc. vs. The Axis (The IE family). Throughout my talk I will draw various comparisons to real-life battles from WWII, as well as the similarities of the technological advances that helped these countries win the war.

My talk will not be a straight-forward IE bashing in any way (especially as they are doing great stuff these days!), but an entertaining look at how developers can survive today's battlefield.

Open source is hard but it gets much easier with a community backing you. I tried many approaches while developing fog, and thankfully, the resulting community is amazing. Now I'm doing my best to apply the same principles to the Heroku CLI and other open source projects. I make mistakes and often get lucky, but I have learned a lot about fostering community in the process. This session distills some of my techniques and explains how you can help build community around your favorite projects.

Are you particular about when and how you drink your coffee? Do you try new coffee shops as soon as you see them? Do you stand and watch people make it before you decide if you want to order anything? And above all, do you judges people for their choice of coffee?! Well Sam kinda thinks you should. If you don't, then give him a chance to explain why you should. And also why it's not a bad thing to be a coffee snob!

CSS2.1 was two dimensional: There was no concept of depth or time. CSS3 brings us some control over both, with transitions and animations for the latter. In this talk we will start from the basics of these new specifications, but will quickly move to more advanced tips and tricks to fully leverage these exciting technologies. The talk will follow Lea’s trademark presentation style, which has been praised by audiences all over Europe.

Clojure is a JVM-based Lisp dialect with simple core abstractions that emphasise immutable data, sequences, and first-class and higher-order functions. In Clojure, code and data are the same.

These simple abstractions have been the inspiration for building new data tools for uSwitch.com: treating everything as data and building many tools that operate on the same data. It has helped us build monitoring, debugging and analytical tools (many of which are written using Clojure) that help us understand how people are interacting with our websites and provides an open-source, open-schema environment for our data that encourages both consumption and production.

Forever the backbone of the Internet, HTML is now trying to escape the browser, but are web technologies the best ways to make native applications? We will explore various emerging platforms for turning HTML, CSS and JavaScript into native applications and weigh up the benefits of each. We'll then look further into the implications of having many different platforms and on to what the W3C has up its sleeve for the future. This is not the old "web vs native" debate, but a look into "web as native" and what it means to development right now and in the increasingly exciting future for web developers.

Although LEGO began as wooden toys back in 1932 it was the LEGO system, in 1958, that really cemented the toy as the devs favourite grown-up toy. In this talk Steve reviews some of the biggest, smallest, weirdest, and intriguing LEGO-related projects of recent times, including a working harpsichord, docking bay 94, a portrait of Tori Amos, and a Mindstorms Segway.

Mark will tell us about craft beer, and the story of BrewDog.

Learn how the audacious team at Brightbox built out the UKs first multi-datacentre public cloud service, with a team smaller than your average Starbucks (express) and a budget smaller than your average lunch with a Tory (allegedly).

We'll traverse a wide-range of subjects and experiences, such as: how solving the hard problems leads to competitive advantage, why you shouldn't overestimate your competitors and how to negotiate above your weight.

The expected massive growth of connected device, appliance & sensor markets in the coming years - often called the 'Internet of Things' - will need a more rich concept of 'open data' than is currently common. When data is generated through activities of people doing things inside their homes and outside in public in their cities, the question of who owns the data becomes almost irrelevant next to the questions of who has access to the data, what do they do with it, and how to citizens manage and make sense of their data while retaining the openness that we've seen drive creativity and business on the web over the last few years.