Eclectic Brain Salad

I was a bit worse for wear on the morning of day 4, thanks to the "high" gleaned from speaking at Web Jam 10, and the resulting beers and Chinese food. I got up and did some e-mailing, then had a quick breakfast and sauntered down to the convention centre along with my family (who said their goodbyes and then went on to the Sydney aquarium, lucky things!) I quickly met up with a few familiar faces, including Ben Buchanan, Ash, Daniel Davis, Mark Boulton, and more. We had a coffee and then sat down for the keynote. John made some opening remarks, and at one point embarrassed me (only slightly, mind) by announcing "Chris Mills is here at the conference" in big letters on a slide, and urging people to come talk to me about education. I was very happy with the mention (I had a few people approach me that day saying about how they were using the Web Standards Curriculum to teach their classes, which is great!) but the way he did it was rather amusing ;-)

Matt Webb - Escalante

Matt Webb was up first, giving your usual inspirational, high level, fluffy, slightly waffly talk to give the attendees and nice fuzzy feeling and then prepare them for the day. I might sound demeaning by saying this, but that's not what I intend - Matt's talk served its purpose well, he is a great presenter, and he gave out some great design ideas, and lots of good sci-fi references ;-)

Mark Boulton - Font embedding and typography

I got the change to introduce the next couple of talks and act as the track chair, which was great for injecting a bit more Opera love into the room, and reiterating the education mission. After ironing out some technical difficulties, Mark took to the stage, and delivered a great talk about improving typography on the Web. It wasn't just concerned with @font-face syntax, or ranting about font licensing inadequacies wrt the Web (although these featured a little bit) - he talked about all the elements that are needed for good typography (colour, layout, etc - it goes way beyond fonts), how using fonts appropriately designed for the screen is needed (this is why the new Microsoft vista font set is actually really good), and how Comic Sans is not necessarily that evil, but just misused a lot ;-)

Ben Galbraith

It was nice to intro Ben, especially given that I'd talked to him quite a lot earlier on in the week. His talk was a very detailed rundown of how the Web is improving as a platform because there are a lot more good developer tools available than there used to be, and then gave a detailed rundown of the best ones. He gave a lot of good Opera mentions while he was at it

Lunch

Lunch was very tasty, and I spent most of it talking to Lachlan and Daniel, and having a laugh with Leslie, Shaun, John, and anyone else who speed up to the table. I took a bit of time out in the afternoon to check some mails and have some good education chats with Helen from Brisbane.

Nick Galvin - The state of the Web as a platform

I went to the state of the web as a platform panel, featuring our own Lachy Hunt, plus Ben G, Doug, and a couple of really marketing-y guys from MS and Adobe. It was basically a fairly business-oriented discussion on where the web is going in the future, as a platform. Some of it was good, but I got the impression that Doug, Lachy and Ben were acting as FUD-busters against the other two. Next up, we three wise men of Opera did a Sitepoint podcast interview with Kevin Yank. Kevin seems like a really nice, interesting guy, and he asked some good questions about Opera's developer outreach strategy.

Cameron Adams - Making Waves

Last up was Cam Adam's keynote, mainly talking about Google Wave - very good indeed. He is a really charismatic presenter, and really funny. The Macfarlane prize presentation followed, and proved to be interesting. It was ace to see Dmitry Baranovskiy win a Macfarlane medal for his work on the Raphaël JS library.

Ignite

Next we went back to the Waterside hotel for some free drinks, and for Ignite Sydney! I had a really good chat to Gian Wild and Kevin Yank, and then Mark Boulton and Lisa Herrod. My talk went really well - I had a lot of wordage to fit in, so I needed to talk quite fast, but I still got a great reaction, with lots of good comments afterwards. Check it out: After I'd finished the jet lag had started to creep back with a vengeance, so I went home and got a nice early night (unheard of for a conference! I felt like a right wuss, but hey...)

I still hadn't got much sleep by the morning of day 2, as my daughter decided to start screaming at 2am. Oh well.

I had a lovely big fry up-style breakfast in the cafe next to the hotel, sharing toast and jollities with my family, Leslie, Shaun and Ash. After a nice chill up, Leslie, Ash and I took the monorail to the workshop venue, and started to get set up. We managed to get ready in time, despite a few small measures of equipment fuck-wittage (forgetting my VGA adaptor, not having the right version of Keynote installed on the other presenter's computers - thank you Apple for your wonderful hardware and version backwards compatibility).

We had a small but dedicated group of attendees, plus Ben Buchanan and Mark Boulton showed up nice and early to swell the numbers. It was time for Ed Directions Sydney!

Setting the scene

I presented the first talk, which set the scene, outlined what we would discuss today, and talked about the resources we had available. It made me laugh that almost all of the attendees were already using the Opera Web standards curriculum and WaSP InterAct material, and were very progressive in terms of the courses they presented. So they weren't really the target audience we need to reach the most!

But I think this is the issue with these kind of events. The educators that don't "get it" are the ones that are less lively to turn up to these events. But I think that if we connect with educators that DO "get it", we can get them to continue local evangelism work and spread our message far and wide.

Ben Buchanan on markup

Ben delivered a great presentation about markup - everything I could've hoped for and more. He didn't show too much code, instead concentrating on transferable principles and good practice - good semantics, accessibility, validation. He didn't dwell on HTML 5 too much either, which was good, as I think it is a red herring right now, as far as educators are concerned.

He also included a great section on how he hires (or doesn't hire) job applicants at his company - he asks for resumes in HTML, then immediately rejects candidates on bad markup and writing. People who pass the initial test are given rigorous tests.

Mark Boulton on design and CSS

Mark's talk was great as well - he again didn't concentrate on too much syntax. The main crux of his talk was that designers aren't built to learn ordered, structured C-O-D-E, so concepts such as specificity and positioning are hard to get through to them. They want to gravitate to "the shiny" - fun visual stuff, but they need to have a solid grounding in the slightly scary principles first.

Give it to them as gently and as visually as possible.

There was so much discussion about teaching techniques during these sessions that I didn't have to cover the markup and CSS classroom integration sessions - all my educational techniques were discussed already ;-)

Cameron Adams - Scripting

Cameron presented a slightly more straight talk on JavaScript from start to finish, containing a bit more syntax, but it was still top-notch, covering all bases. He made some good points about starting small with little JavaScript features, and then progressing to web applications. He also mentioned that people were likely to be in one of two camps - application writers, or web page writers. Also, he talked about how validation and unobtrusiveness were not necessarily absolute essentials - they were things to strive for always, but depending on the target audience, some apps would be ok to absolutely require JavaScript. Think of functionality like Google Maps and Google Wave. He also talked about how libraries were a great teaching aid, and took a lot of the horrible complexity of some JavaScript operations away from the developer, for example cross browser event handlers. But you should still aim to start at first principles and not just teach a JS library. You can't guarantee that every project you come across will use the same JS library!

Lisa Herrod - Accessibility/Usability

Scenario girl's talk was really great - she delivered it from the inclusive design angle, which was a great slant. She showed how she has taken the WCAG checkpoints and given them different labels to show who in a project team should have the responsibility of making sure these points are addressed. It's not all the front-end developer; some of it falls upon the content writer for example, or the designer. This is a great way to split the workload up a bit, and make accessibility feel less of a burden to handle. Of course, we really need to get away from accessibility being a bolt-on accessory at the end of a project; too many people still think of it this way.

At this point, I started to feel really tried again. I looked so obviously jet-lagged that Lisa sent me out of the room ;-)

Jeremy Yuille created some really cool sketch notes from Lisa's talk.

Educator panel

We rounded off the day with a educator's panel, which turned into a big open discussion, as most people there were educators with lots to say! We talked about our own experiences, shared ideas, and had a great fun.

I think the day was a success - we got a look of good thinking done, and made some great new friends. Leslie was taking video of all the talks, so hopefully this will be available soon.

WE rock in the evening

As soon as we had finished the workshop, we had to rush over the the WE rock event venue and get set up! By this point I was so tired with jet lag that I wasn't making much sense, but I will recount what I can remember of the evening here.

I had some great conversations before the event started with Gian Wild, and a few others. The room was mostly full of web geeks and educators who already seem to "get it", so I don't think the talk material had as appropriate a target audience as the one in Chattanooga (the material is fairly low level, and I think, most appropriate to non-geeks, education administrators, etc), but it still seemed to go down well, and strike a lot of nerves.

Leslie talked about the education challenge and the opportunity it created (getting me to come up on stage to talk about the Opera web standards curriculum half way through.) I then came back on stage to talk about why web standards are so important to teach. Then Christian Crumlish talked about Yahoo Juku, Jeremy Yuille gave his take on education from an interaction design perspective and the need from transferrable skills, and John Allsopp rounded things off.

It was great to talk to Jeremy some more afterwards, and Ricky Onsman (who had been at the workshop earlier in the day), and my colleague Daniel from Opera, who brought me a wonderful cute little Japanese beer (135ml of Asahi - so cute!) But it was time for me to hit the sack.

As I write this, I actually feel awake for the first time since being here. Yes!

Here is my report on the excellent Fronteers conference, which happened in Amsterdam in September 2008.

Read more...

It's been a good week so far - not only are we getting excited about the impending arrival of a beautiful little baby girl in my household, but my other "baby" has just been published - the Opera web standards curriculum, to be exact.

This is my educational course, which aims to provide high quality web standards education to anyone that can benefit from it, and improve the adoption of web standards across the web. It has been created with support from the Yahoo! developer network, and a lot of hard work from myself, but more importantly, all the authors who contributed. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making this a reality.

I can see this benefitting many people across the globe, from students and teachers, to inhouse trainers, and existing web developers wishing to upgrade their skills.

Start digesting the course, and let me know what you think. I am trying to make this as good as it can possibly be, so any feedback is much appreciated.