Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Jeremy Ashkenas – A Cup of CoffeeScript

Photo of Jeremy AshkenasAfter a lost decade in the wilderness, JavaScript is starting to change and evolve. We’ll look at CoffeeScript, a little language that compiles into JavaScript, providing concise ways to to write many common JavaScript patterns.

Ross Boucher – Quality Control: Testing and debugging your apps

Photo of Ross BoucherDevelopers have long been able to use an array of debugging, profiling and other testing tools to ensure application quality and performance. More recently, web developers have started to rely on increasingly sophisticated tools to help test their web sites and applications. But particularly in the mobile space, when developing sophisticated applications with web technologies, testing presents significant challenges.

Esther Derby – Agile meets UI

Esther Derbyr PortraitEsther will share strategies for evolving UI design as the software grows, keeping UI designers in the loop and helping everyone on the team be a better designer (cause they think already are).

Tatham Oddie – Practicing Web Standards in the Large

Tatham Oddie PortraitWeb standards might be second nature to all of us here, but they don’t always fly so easily in the enterprise. Obscure browsers and CIOs watching their bottom line can often leave a passionate development team feeling stifled. In this session we’ll look at how a number of large scale websites successfully adopted new standards and opened their content to more audiences and devices than ever before.

Matt Webb – Opening keynote: Escalante

Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 9.10am.

Matt Webb PortraitThe long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web – breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero – for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design – playful and rational all at once – to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

Andrew Fisher – Cloud computing

Andrew Fisher PortraitCloud services change the way a business or campaign can operate, increasing flexibility, taking less time to deploy and introducing superb cost efficiencies so that we can redirect finances to where they’ll really pay for us – in innovation, experimentation and planning ahead. With these opportunities, however, come challenges around data and platform security, change management and who “owns” the platform and data you are using.

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Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development

Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney