Photo: Ben Buchanan

The Presentation

The awesome team of Diana Mounter and Reem Abdelaty from the LGwebnetwork asked if I would deliver the closing keynote for their first ever web conference, WE Believe in Community. I was honoured to accept.

I wanted to show people what I see in the web. What I see happening. Where I think everything is going. But I’m a firm believer in showing people techniques and technologies they can use right now. All of which made it very easy for me to talk about the Open Web. There’s an entire blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time about that, so we won’t get into it here. This is just to post my slides and to say that video and a podcast will be forthcoming at some point in the future. (I hear end of the week.) Update: Video is now available.

The conference

Put together in only a few months to meet a pressing need for stronger networking and more formal professional development for local government web workers, the entire experience was amazing. Both Reem and Diana radiate energy and passion and they communicated this to every attendee. There was a huge buzz of engagement and involvement. It was a real privilege to be a part of it!

The other big win of the two days was the outstanding quality of the content. John Allsopp delivered a stirring opening keynote of what constitutes the web and how you can expect to access it going forward. He delivered some concepts I’m going to be thinking about for a long time. I particularly enjoyed these quotes too:

• “the web just connects stuff together, do you really think you need a screen?”; and
• “local government should be be building the networks, they’re the sewers of the 21st century”.

Another presentation that I really enjoyed was Matthew Hodgson on the death and rebirth of intranets. He had a clever premise and great solid content that intertwined really well. He also managed to record himself, so he has audio up already! Unfortunately, I missed Ruth Ellison’s as she was just before me (and I was in the tea room doing the obsessive compulsive slide check), but she has her (and Adrian’s) slides up already along with a great summation of each presentation she saw. There were lots of other great speakers, so hopefully they’ll be putting their slides up soon too.

Photo: Ruth Ellison

All up, a fantastic couple of days. Thanks to all the great new people I met for arguing with me over drinks about the open web and why it’s important. And thanks again to Diana and Reem for creating such a charged event! Not to mention the incredibly generous gift thanking speakers &emdash; a customised iPod Shuffle.

See more photos and tweets on the Open Web.

I was very pleased to be speaking at Remix Australia this week. Thanks must go to Michael Kordahi, Shane Morris, and Nick Hodge for trusting that a guy who hadn’t done a public presentation in nearly a year could deliver the goods.

Talking ‘bout a revolution

Damian Edwards and I were asked to do the IE8 session together. The point of the session was to give an overview of the new features and capabilities, in particular the brand-spanking new standards-compliant rendering engine. We also decided to make the most of the opportunity to pimp standards-based design methodologies and concepts to the .NET and Silverlight focused crowd.

Damian took responsibility for developing solid demos to illustrate standards-based design techniques and the innovations in IE8 such as WebSlices and Activities. I delivered the historical context, the philosophy and the concepts we wanted to impart.

I think we ended up with a solidly crafted presentation that wove the themes of Internet Explorer 8’s development principles, standards-based design philosophies and best practice web innovation together. We’ve had some great feedback so far and one member of the Melbourne audience even said: That was the most concise succinct explanation of those concepts I’ve ever heard. This was the most productive session of the day for me. Obviously Damian and I are rapt that somebody felt so strongly about our work. That really made the day for me.

Huge thanks to Damian for all the work he put in to make sure we nailed it!

I’ve added the presentation to Slideshare, although it won’t be anywhere near as cool without all the demos and we used the slides for points of reference rather than as detailed content:

| View | Upload your own

Turns out Damo posted the code from the demos on his blog.

Rolling with my homies

As ever, the absolute best part of the conference was all the amazing incredible talented people I got to meet, talk with and hang with.

Mark Pesce delivered a stirring call to action for all developers in the keynote. We hold the key to the future. We’re the ones who can empower both the public and our own organisations by building the right tools. You can read his speech in its entirety on his blog and the video has just been posted. Go get some!

I met the incredibly friendly folks from Soul Solutions at the first speaker rehearsals. Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien are two of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve met in a long time and they build awesome stuff too as I discovered when I watched their demos in the Windows Live Platform sessions. I’ve been expecting to see presence indication in more and more sites and it was cool to see how they’d integrated IM into their applications seamlessly.

My favourite presentation of the conference was easily the one covering the new possibilities in Silverlight 2. Jonas Follesø built an awesome Twitter/Flickr mashup in front of us in about 35 minutes, while explaining in precise detail every step and the reasoning for it. The source and slides are available at that link. If that wasn’t incredible enough (and it was), José Fajardo demonstrated some really astonishing DeepZoom prototypes he’d built.

José decided that people haven’t recognised the true potential in DeepZoom and so he asked himself 3 questions, then tried to answer them each in code within 30 minutes. He showed us the results and convinced me, at least, that we need to be looking much further ahead than we have been with interactions on the web.

His questions went something like this:

1. What if every image on the web were DeepZoomable?
2. What if we had full control over every document on the web?
3. What if people could share DeepZoom images easily?

I don’t have the precise questions and I don’t want to steal his thunder for when he blogs it (you are blogging this, right, José?), but his examples were simply phenomenal. I’m going to be asking myself a lot of questions like this in future – to help myself stretch my knowledge and use of the technologies I know. And to stretch how they’re used by everyone. 30 minute prototyping exercises are the way of the future!

In combination, the presentation by Jonas and José convinced me that I need to learn Silverlight. There is much potential for awesomeness there, if used properly.

I also met the very talented, very cool Hege Rokenes. She’s a Norwegian graphic designer who’s freelancing in Melbourne for the next year or so. She won the Silverlight video clip contest with her Step Back video (Silverlight required – of course). She’s looking for more freelance or a position with a Melbourne company. If you want a talented designer with an interest in web standards and Silverlight, you’d be crazy not to look her up.

I finally got to meet Tatham Oddie, who I really should have met by now as he’s into all the same things I am, but comes at them from a Microsoft technologies angle. He was even at Web Directions South last year! Go read his post on Location Awareness to see why I’m very keen to see what he gets up to next!

And lastly, there were so many other amazing people that I ran into in hallways, stairwells and bars. I have a bunch of business cards, contact details and new Twitter followers, so I’ll be keeping in touch with them too.

Whole lotta love

Many people asked me why I was going to a Microsoft conference. The previous section of this article is why. There are brilliant talented friendly people in every community. Cross-pollination of ideas, philosophies and experiences can only help to push the web forward. Exposure to different ideas and techniques that are new to me can only help me.

I talked to people about my work, both at Atlassian and outside. I shared concepts about integrating with large-scale CMSes, modernising legacy codebases, and promoting the open web. I compared notes on Ruby, Rails, .NET and Java. I learned about new technologies and techniques. I saw cool prototypes and interactions. I think I even convinced a few RIA developers to go learn HTML!

Next time you have the opportunity to go to a conference, do it. Seize the experiences and make them your own. What you get out of a conference comes from what you put in. It’s not just about sitting in sessions and heckling via the backchannel. It’s about participating in every way you can.

I appreciated every second of this week. Remix sums it up nicely.

Back in May, I read an article describing a Sun Microsystem project to replace Ajax. What caught my attention was the attitude towards existing web technologies.

Turns out the author had the focus of the article all backwards (at least I’m sure the Sun engineers would think so). The Ajax example was simply that. Sun’s Project Flair was implementing something far far more complex.

Earlier this month, the project announced the open sourcing of the Sun Labs Lively Kernel, an implementation of the Morphic user interface framework in JavaScript.

This is the point at which all the hardcore CompSci programming freaks start salivating. Squeak on the client side? Imagine using Seaside for server development and Lively Kernel for the client!

For those unfamiliar, and I can thank Myles Byrne for introducing me to these concepts at the first RailsCamp, this means that the Lively Kernel environment can be extended and developed while programming inside the that same environment - no reboots or compiling needed. If that sounds esoteric, it is, extremely so; but it’s also as powerful as it is difficult. Which is why those CompSci geeks are drooling.

Meanwhile, my inner standardista is screaming.

Our goal is to build a platform using a minimum number of underlying technologies. This is in contrast with many current web technologies that utilize a diverse array of technologies such as HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, PHP, XML, and so on.

That quote resides in the Motivation section of the Lively Kernel description. It evens sounds quite reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to cut down on the number of things you have to learn in order to be good at this thing we do? Being a skillful generalist is hard.

Not everybody can do what we do, and I’m not dissing these guys because I know they can program rings around me, but being hot programmers doesn’t make them web developers. The reason the web works is because of that layered approach. Because of those disparate technologies that can be drawn together to make something strong, elegant and stable.

Building an entire website or “web application environment” in JavaScript strikes me as an interesting experiment and I know people who’ve done similar things (wave Myles again, everybody), but it is not where the web should be progressing towards.

Simplification is good. I’d love some more simplicity in my day-to-day work! But bringing everything down to a single uniform level is pushing that too far. It’s called putting all your eggs in one basket. Or even worse, it’s called a monoculture. If you want some intense thought cud for the next weeks or months, go and read Anil Dash on Monoculture and Web 2.0.

On that note, I’ll leave with a quote that sums up how at least some people at Sun are thinking about the web and web technologies right now:

AJAX sort of deals with all of the old way of doing things. It makes it simpler, which is great, but underneath it’s still all this junky HTML, Document Object Model, CSS, all that stuff, where 30 years ago, we knew how to do that stuff cleanly with a dynamic programming language and a simple graphics model