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March 24, 2008
On Saturday, the 22nd of March around 40 developers came to Station C in Montreal, Canada to meet up for the first Coder's Saturday.
The unconference-styled event was sponsored by Yahoo! Quebec and Nurun and was meant to bring people interested in web development together to hear and talk about topics of interest both to web development as a whole but also start local connections.
The location is a co-working office with lots of computers and comfy chairs and we put together some rows of harder chairs and a projector to enjoy the presentations. There will also be videos of the presentations available once Nurun got around to converting the tapes.
My presentation was entitled "The struggle for web development standards" and was partly inspired by my experience at the AjaxWorld conference in New York the week before. There a lot of companies showed framework and metaprogramming solutions to day to day web development problems and the idea of web standards and best practices in use in the web design world didn't even come up. The problem with this is that a standard is more than a technical crutch to support us, it is actually about how we work together. This is what I wanted to get across with my presentation:
Ara Pehlivanian explained the concept for web2.0 development.
The idea of his presentation was similar to a lot of other presentations about best practices, but Ara took the angle not to sell them as a way to produce good code but to deliver products that simply work without you having the re-visit them later on. Usability, accessibility and working web sites as consequences of not following assumptions.
Sarven Capadisli delivered a presentation on Microformats that was inspired by his blog post on the matter. It was very refreshing to see a Microformat talk that explained the why of microformats rather than once again showing how you can convert an hcard to a vcard with a simple link to Technorati's conversion tool.
There was also a presentation about the Google Web Toolkit which explained the idea of metaprogramming JavaScript with Java and avoiding browser problems this way and I rounded up the day with an impromptu introduction to all the offers we have for developers on developer.yahoo.net.
All in all it was a nice morning and early afternoon and I want to thank all the organizers and participants for making my short stint in Canada productive and fun.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at March 24, 2008 5:12 PM
Hi,
Excellent article - I really appreciate your knowledge about web development, I have bookmarked it for later viewing and forwarded it on.
Cheers.
Posted by: Nancy at March 24, 2008 9:59 PM
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