"speaking" in Weblog

Towards the end of last year I had the privilege to be invited to speak at the rather marvellous TEDx event put on by CodeWorks up in Newcastle. Each of the talks was filmed to the exacting TED standard and the result is a very slick-looking video of me rambling on about some of my favourite things.

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It’s a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs.

In a lineup like that I clearly can’t talk about nuts and bolts Javascript. Instead I’m taking a slightly unusual tack for me: revelations. Since Ajax came along my job has changed in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. Technically I’m a flavour of designer yet after many years of specialising I’ve found myself having to skill up again.

• To keep a handle on what the rest of the team produce I’ve become a testing fanatic;

• I’ve had to go back and relearn how to program - not to necessarily produce back-end code but to understand what the real implications of my design decisions are;

• I’ve been converted to Agile practices as a means of effective collaboration.

None of these things are traditionally within the remit of ‘design’ but they all feed into producing a successful app. To try and describe these changes and what I’ve done about them I will be presenting But I’m a Bloody Designer! on the first day, straight after the keynote by the Ajaxians.

So, the lineup’s great, it’s in London. @media Ajax: coming soon. Say hello if you decide to come…

On Sunday I’m packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I’ve always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I’m incredibly excited to be speaking! Fellow Tramponaught Charles Armstrong and I are tag teaming Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control… It’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. It should be interesting though and I’m looking forward to it. Charles is doing the first half on the human need to build mental models of the tools they use and I’m going to quickly run through the increasing difficulty in letting them do that with modern emergent systems. Yep.

Straight after the conference I’m going to be hopping in a car and driving to San Francisco via the coast road. I don’t exactly know why but it appeals to me for some reason. I did a long drive down to Key West during The Spring Experience in December and really enjoyed it. This time it’ll be two or three days on the road, staying in motels along the way - a proper road trip. Then I’ve got a few days in SF to just chill, have a look around and take in the sights before heading back to London. It should be a good 10 days!

After 5 good years I’m hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I’m becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up ‘sedentary’ is likely to be completely the wrong word… It’s going to be hard work - we’re up against the big boys - but it’s a really interesting field and the product we’ve been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don’t know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it’s a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I’ve been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I’ve been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I’ve become less interested in web standards per se (it’s just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I’m really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I’ll be permanent within the next couple of months. It’s going to be a busy period for me… I really want to get the work I’ve been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I’m speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I’ve also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there’s a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.

I’ve just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to give out that weren’t on the slides. For anyone who’s interested here they are, and for anyone who dragged themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to come see me speak: Thanks, I really enjoyed it! Many thanks also to all the Spring folk who’ve made my weekend thoroughly enjoyable.

Introduction

Don’t bet against the internet

Web standards

Progressive enhancement

Graded Browser Support

A-Grade Browser Support Chart

HTML

HTML Mastery Links

CSS is Worthless

Microformats

Bill Gates: “We need microformats”

CSS

Div Mania

Modular CSS

A CSS Framework

Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids

CSS: Specificity Wars

Specificity

How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup

hasLayout

Javascript

A DOM Ready Extension for Prototype

The JavaScript Library World Cup

Notes on JavaScript Libraries

Javascript and Accessibility

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?

Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers

FlashAid

Bringing new life to applets with Ajax

Web 2.0: Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?

Unobtrusive Javascript

RailsConf Presentation Slides and Example Code

Hijax

The Enron Explorer

Who’s this bloke then? Yep, I recognise him too…

So, I’m off to Miami in December to speak at The Spring Experience! I’m excited and a little nervous. The sessions are super-long, weighing in at 90 minutes, but quite small so a workshop-type-thing might be possible, but I’ll have to wait and see. Keeping peoples’ attention for that long is a very daunting prospect.

I’d never heard of Spring (not surprising really, not being a Java programmer) until these guys contacted me but since then I’ve been seeing it everywhere. It turns out that the Trampoline guys are using it in the back-end of the app we’re currently building and some of the Wordtracker folk have used it too. I still don’t have a great handle on what it does so I’ll have to collar someone and get a proper explanation.