A quick note–the Australian Financial Year ends June 30, so if you have training budget to spend, please keep in mind our upcoming conferences, and our streaming platform Conffab we’ve got you covered whatever your budget, from $20 a month and up. I had hoped over the last few weeks to keep up my unbroken […]
Once again a slightly smaller roundup than some weeks have been this year, but still some great reading and viewing to tide you over. From a milestone implementation of the new Date and Time API for JavaScript, Temporal, to news on a brand new browser engine, and much more, these are the things that have […]
Another somewhat quieter week this week–looking back at this time last year it doesn’t seem to be a seasonal thing. But then again the last week has seen both Microsoft’s Build conference and Google’s I/O, with plenty of announcements–so they may have taken the oxygen out of the room somewhat? But we’ve stayed busy at […]
It should be clear we’re very interested in the implications for software engineering of large language models here at Web Directions. Last month we hosted an unconference in Melbourne on the topic (you can find our writeup here) and this week we hosted a similar event in Sydney. Each had surprisingly different areas of focus. […]
Join the legendary CSS Day Conference on Conffab This June! We’re genuinely excited to announce that Conffab will be streaming the renowned CSS Day conference live from Amsterdam on June 5th and 6th, 2025! This focused, advanced CSS conference brings together the brightest minds in web development for two days of deep insights and cutting-edge […]
A bit of a quieter one on the reading front this week. Perhaps there’s less being published by the folks I read? But we’ve certainly been busy at Web Directions–here’s what’s coming up! AI and Software Engineering Unconference We’re hosting our second AI and Software Engineering unconference, in Sydney. It’s free, on Wednesday May 21st […]
I’ve often told the story of how it was an interest in AI that, as much as anything else, that drew me to computer science in the 1980s. That was the era of expert systems and symbolic logic. Our final-year elective—the first and only time AI was covered in my degree—was, from memory, almost entirely about hill-climbing algorithms. […]
One of the emerging concerns with LLMs is what Christopher Noessel, keynote speaker at UX Australia this August, calls deskilling—“when users lose skills they previously had, but handed off to the AI.” Others are more blunt, like James Anderson, who writes in a more thoughtful piece than the title might suggest: People often talk about […]
For 3 decades now (indeed a little more) my life has revolved around the Web. Developing for it, developing software to help others develop for it, writing about it, teaching about it, talking about it. Curiously the last couple of weeks’ roundups have had some backwards looking aspects to them–last week we had a refresher […]
Front-end development has long been about much more than just aesthetics, though the engineering aspects of the front end are still often undervalued. But as we know, front end development has evolved into a critical engineering discipline essential to performance, security, scalability, and of course user outcomes. Web Directions Code 2025 is your team’s once-a-year […]
Last week we took a week off for the East weekend. We did however post a substantial wrap up for our first unconference, on AI and Software Engineering–so please do take a look. You’ll get a sense of what experienced software engineers and engineering leaders are thinking about when it comes to the impact of […]
Yesterday, we ran an in-person unconference with a big question at its heart: what does software engineering look like in the age of large language models? We weren’t so much interested in prompt hacks or productivity tools. We weren’t asking how to pass LeetCode with ChatGPT, or automate our Jira boards. We were trying to […]
A quarter of a century ago this week, A List Apart published A Dao of Web Design, something I wrote about how to think about the web, and design for it. I’m working on a piece or two revisiting this, and have the privilege of speaking on this topic at CSS Day in June, since […]
Isaiah Berlin was something very rare these days, a public intellectual. An academic, he also wrote more popular books and essays, including The Hedgehog and the Fox. The hedgehog, he writes ‘view[s] the world through the lens of a single defining idea’, whole the fox ‘draw[s] on a wide variety of experiences and for whom […]
Nearly two dozen articles, talks and more this week, from new CSS that will finally, finally allow us to style the select elements, to a 3 and a half hour video on how LLMs work from someone who really knows. We’ve also got a couple of bonus talk videos on Conffab (no signup required) There’s […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
