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swdc 2011

It was FINALLY time for the annual scandinavian web developer conference. A day packed with the coolest speakers working with webish stuff right now.
 
  • Paul Lewis on making games with html5. He showed some really cool things possible to do with html5. Everyone longed to make games after this talk. And don't forget to build YOUR OWN 3D engine!
  • Anders Magnus Andersen on responsive design in a fragmented browser landscape. A responsive design on the web adapts to the users device. Elements may be invisible, resized or rearranged on smaller displays and makes it easier to have only one code base. Basically the code adapts to the screen size and other properties of the users environment.
  • Johannes Fahrenkrug on web vs native for mobile. CROSS PLATFORM UIS SUCK! It is a conceptual mistake. But they work on the web cause the web is its own platform. “If it looks like a native app, people expect it to behave exactly like a native app.” This was a really good and focused presentation.
  • Lea Verou on CSS in the 4th dimension. Lea showed us CSS properties for transitions and animations. Some really cool stuff that may NOT WORK in your browser. Yet another reason to use LESS or SASS. Check out the really cool demo.
  • Christoffer Luthmann on web analytics. This was a nice talk about analytics and reminded me to think beyond the js cut and paste. Many further things are possible when a bit thought is out into what and when web pages are tracked. He also had some nice input on how to test a design change.
  • Charlie Robbins on node.js. He confirmed my fear that node currently is in the wild wild west. He then did a couple of fun things some of which were a bit community introverted. We forgave him for this when the new node niceness called flatiron was announced. It is a bunch of existing node libraries bundled together to kinda become the rails of node. Or NOT BECOME the rails of node depending on your religious view on the subject.
  • Sergi Mansilla on cloud9. It is a really cool web based IDE for javascript. I sort of faded away during this presentation since I have heard about it before.
  • Jonas Nicklas on testing. This was the best and the most needed of todays presentations. The javascript community is typically not writing testable code of good design. (At least most code that I have seen....) How hard can it be to put in some QUALITY?
  • Max Ogden on distributed html5 apps with CouchDB. This was a fun, hand drawn talk with a great emphasis on CATS. Max talked a bit about HTTP sweetness and introduced the nice thing called datacouch worth checking out in more detail.
 
Ludvig is nicely collecting all the slides in one single post.
 
The venue at the Royal Institute of Technology in Kista worked fine although it is hard to beat last years Skandia. It was easier to not fall asleep in this place though! The food was fine despite traces of school… A great event as we have come to expect when Peter Svensson is organizing. Next up – crash and burn. See you then!
 
(Sidenote: I am exploring SHOUTING in this post - let me know what you think!)