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.

Rachel Hinman – Mobile Prototyping Essentials

Photo of Rachel HinmanWe’ve heard it all before… prototype, prototype, prototype. It’s a standard step in almost any design process — but often the first step skipped in time and budget constrained projects. While prototyping is considered a standard step in any UX design process, it is an *essential* part of the mobile UX process. This talk will outline why prototyping is essential to part of the mobile UX process and how prolific prototyping is a necessary step for designers keen to grow the ruthless editing skills necessary to craft successful mobile experiences.

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.

Kelly Goto – Keynote: WorkFLOW

Kelly Goto PortraitShift your thinking, alter your process, and create a dynamic of doing rather than spinning. Workflow veteran Kelly Goto leads you through a fast-paced session designed to help transcend obstacles and develop a culture of adaptation, progress and flow. Learn the fundamental principles behind The FLOW Method, an actionable series of steps utilizing new processes and techniques to re-invigorate your organization and team. Whether you are an independent, small business owner or the manager of an in-house web marketing team, you will gain valuable insights and tools to bring back to your organization.

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.

Pete Ottery – Designing for suits

Pete Ottery PortraitDesigning websites in amongst the “suits” and their business models, targets, projections and synergies (ha!) can be death by dot point. Or fun. What are manager types actually thinking when they brief (or don’t) you. How do you translate their KPI’s into interface designs that

  1. 1. get their point across & achieve their targets
  2. 2. contribute to a profitable business
  3. 3. are easy to use (who would have thought the users get a say! ;-)

Grant Young – Strategies for social media engagement

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 11.45am.

Grant Young PortraitWith so many social networks blooming, all with different participants and methods of interaction, it can be hard to determine where to invest your energy, time and $$.
The session will provide ideas and a “background briefing” to help you answer the question:

Ben Winter-Giles – Managing agile projects within large organisations

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

Ben Winter_Giles PortraitSo you work at enterprise level. Lots of stake holders, lots of competition for time, need to deliver to multiple demands that…POP up. All projects incur change over time, that’s the way of the world. Using a benefits driven approach to delivery rather than a process driven or methodology governed approach frees the team to think laterally, and be responsive to client demands.

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson – The story of Campaign Monitor

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Dave Greiner and Ben Richardson Portrait

Campaign Monitor is a great home grown web app success story. Dave and Ben will share their experiences of taking an idea they believed in, working like mad to implement it, and getting it to market. Along the way you’ll hear about how the idea was born, deciding what to build, pricing, building the product, getting the word out, handling support from Sydney, and all those things you’ll never know till you try.

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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