Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Rethinking Software engineering in the age of LLMs–the Sydney edition

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. […]

CSS Day is coming to Conffab!

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 […]

Your weekly reading for mid May

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 […]

Introducing Web Directions Engineering AI

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. […]

Are AIs making us stupid?

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 […]

Your weekend reading

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 […]

The Web Directions Code 2025 schedule-the front end grows up

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 […]

Your weekly roundup of reading, listening and viewing

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 […]

Your weekend reading

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 […]

Your weekly reading for April 7th–the fox and hedgehog edition

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 […]

Introducing Web Directions Unconferences

Some topics are new, rapidly evolving, and exploring them doesn’t fit neatly into traditional conference structures. They can benefit instead from unconferences—participant-driven events emphasizing emerging conversations and collective exploration, rather than predefined, organizer-driven agendas. So, Web Directions will host a new ad hoc series of these unconference-style gatherings, centered on intriguing and emerging topics. Each […]

Your weekly reading for March 24

Is there more great content being published? Are my antennae just getting better? Perhaps it’s an improved workflow? One thing’s certain—it’s definitely not more free time! Yet somehow, the weekly reading roundup keeps growing. You might ask: What’s the point of these eclectic roundups? Why should you read them? And why do I invest time […]

Your weekly reading–it’s the vibe (coding)

This week we’ve got another roundup of great articles and more, across CSS, JavaScript, performance, accessibility, design, some history with an ancient website and even more ancient computer, and of course, more than a little about writing software with AI. Last week I had the privilege to record a conversation with Jeremy Howard, now of […]

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Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney