Whilst we were out there our trip co-incided with a YUI 3 event so we thought it would be rude not to head along to that.

YUI 3.0 Event at Brickhouse

Before DjangoCon started, Cyril and I got the plane to San Francisco and went over to Yahoo’s Brickhouse to met up with old friend and ex-colleague Ben Ward and to see the YUI 3.0 presentation in the evening. After a swift bit of awesome tex-mex Cyril and I went for a quick mooch around town before getting back in time to see Nate Koechley, Adam Moore and Matt Sweeney talk about YUI 3.0.

All in all I was really quite impressed with how YUI 3.0 is shaping up. As an ex-yahoo who is now using JQuery I feel it’s looking to have addressed some the things that other people have always criticised. Having used YUI 2 at Yahoo I never found the verbose namespacing that much of an issue but having now using JQuery I can kind of see what people were talking about. This is very much a thing of the past with YUI 3. Also something that I’ve struggled with using JQuery is that it’s such an abstraction. I tend to use JQuery for the stuff it does really well like selectors and events (JQuery’s event implementation is very simple and clear) but use standard JavaScript for most other things. YUI 3.0 sticks to making it’s interface follow existing JavaScript interfaces much more closely, whilst adding necessary features such as CSS selectors. Although I’ve yet to play with it I’m looking forward to trying it out, as I’m pretty sure I’m going to like it.

Afterwards Cyril, Tristan and Ben and I headed out for the second mexican of the day; it was like a marketplace team re-union sans fondue! (We made up for that later!).

DjangoCon Preparation

On the Friday (Evil)Rob, Cyril and I headed over to the GooglePlex , where we were taken on a tour of the facilities and met with the Open Source team. My take on the Googleplex is that it’s awesome but at the same time scary, because it’s clear that the intention is to provide everything so Google becomes the hub of every day. Still with facilities like that you’re going to want to work long hours!

DjangoCon Day One

After helping out on the registration desk we caught Guido’s talk about AppEngine and it sounds like in the future it’s going to be possible to get Django’s ORM talking to BigTable directly which would be fantastic. It was also interesting to see Guido’s code review app which I got some pictures of someone has ported this to standard Django app and I hope they post details at some point.

Adrian Holovaty’s presentation on the history of Django was really interesting. It really proved the idea of putting something together and then iterating on it.

Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge talked about ReviewBoard and their utility apps Djblets. Really liked the look of the Djblet called siteconfig. It’s basically a way to create an interface for Django settings. Review Board itself is something I’ve been meaning to play with, Cyril asked the question I’d wanted to ask which was, is there support for bazaar and apparently there is. Excellent!

Malcolm Treddinnick’s talk about the Django ORM was really impressive, mainly it made it really clear how much effort has gone into the queryset refactoring. Also it came across that the ORM is much more flexible when it comes to creating custom query methods something which was borne out by the next presentation.

Justin Bronn talked about his project GeoDjango. GeoDjango takes your breath away as it’s got support for a huge range of geo formats and standards and it makes some truly astonishing things possible. What I didn’t realise is tha GeoDjango uses Geo Queryset methods to perform spatial operations with spatial databases such as PostGIS. An example was shown of an imported dataset of all of the states in the US which had been mapped as polygons. Justin demonstrated in the admin how it’s possible to change the co-ordinates of the polygon through a draggable interface and save it. All kinds of queries can be made to find where objects intersect or whether they’re contained within a boundary etc. Brilliant work.

To close day one, Cal Henderson gave an brilliant presentation on “Why he hates Django”. It was mostly a massive piss-take but with some serious points thrown in, and really covered a lot of areas in Django that are no-doubt going to be addressed at some point in the future.

Day Two

I saw Mark Ramm talk about what Django could learn from Zope. I thought there were some interesting points made. The main one though is just the general point that the Django community shouldn’t become blinkered and should look to benefit where possible from other work within the Python Web development community.

Malcolm’s talk on Code and patch design was good – he cut right to the point on what’s needed to make a good contribution and pretty much everything he said was common sense.

The Django Success stories was quite interesting as it really focussed on practical things that people had learnt using Django in their work and I think as a general point some of the most interesting stuff learned from attending DjangoCon came from hearing about what people are building with Django. Definitely should be more of that at future DjangoCons.

Lastly after a live eposide of TWiD, Adrian and Jacob hosted a session to close DjangoCon to cover what’s going to be happening in the future. After detailing their recommendations they opened up to the audience to make their “I want a Pony” requests. Utimately Django’s future is looking really good and I came away from the whole event pleased about the direction it’s all going in and looking forward to be able to contribute back to the project in whatever way possible.

Well done to Rob for all his efforts in putting together the conference. Google also did an amazing job of hosting it and I’m looking forward to the next one.

San Francisco

With DjangoCon over I took a couple of days to visit San Francisco where I caught up with Ben and Cyril for a great meal at Spork after spending a bit of time in the Haight seeing the Grateful Dead house and buying a load of awesome Deadhead stickers etc!

I also enjoyed an epic walk from the centre of the city out to the Golden Gate bridge prior to meeting up with some Yahoo’s for Fondue at San Mateo. I made sure to take the chance to sample several of the city’s finest coffee shops including checking out the Japanese Syphon bar at the Blue Bottle. San Francisco is awesome and I hope that I can visit again soon!

The first DJUGL (Django Users Group London) Meetup is happening on the 19th May at GCAP HQ in Leicester square at 7pm.

I’ll be presenting “Django from a developers point of view” where I’ll be talking about my thoughts on what makes Django a good framework choice.

It’s worth pointing out that the organisers welcome anyone who’s new to Django alongside seasoned Django developers alike.

If you wish to attend please register at the DJUGL event page as at time of writing there’s only 28 tickets left.

I’m pleased to announce that after a hiatus the WSG London events are back! The next event is on the subject of “findability” as part of London Web Week on Wednesday 28th May.

“Findability” is a term coined by Peter Morville, which refers to how possible it is to locate or navigate something.

The presentations for this event will cover the basic concepts of what findability is and why it’s important as well as practical examples of how you can achieve a findable website. We’ll also be looking at FireEagle which is a site that is all about making people and services findable.

Here’s the list of speakers and their presentations:

• Cyril Doussin – The concepts of findability
• Stuart Colville (yours truly) – Building websites with findability in mind
• Steve Marshall- Finding yourself with Fire Eagle

To find out more details and to register to attend the event please visit the WSG London Mini Site

SXSWi is the geek excursion of the year for me. It’s a chance to catch up with old friends meet new people and to generally geek-out in one of the coolest cities I’ve ever been to, Austin Texas.

This year to do something slightly unusual Cyril, Tristan and myself had decided to head to Houston, hire a car then drive to Austin at some point after seeing a bit more of Texas. After a 10 hour flight we got the car and headed out onto the highway towards San Antonio where we had planned to meet up with Opera’s Chris Mills and the internet’s Carl Camera and his family.

The drive was eye-opening in several ways. Having never seen any part of the US other than Austin for the last 2 years running I was looking forward to our little road-trip. What was surprising though was how long the bill-boards and hoardings were with us between Houston and San Antonio. If I recall correctly it seemed as if they only stopped for about 30 minutes of the 3 and a half hour drive; where at which point they were replaced with longhorn cattle and ranches and then as we drew closer to San Antonio the billboards and advertising started up again and it made me realise how much people are bombarded with ads just by going about their daily business. Perhaps though if this is something that you’re used to you mentally block them out find them far less intrusive?

Remember the Alamo

I’d taken over driven after a quick pit-stop and was beginning to feel like I couldn’t wait to arrive. Fortunately the lights of San Antonio were twinkling in the distance and it wasn’t long before we were finding our way to the Hampon Inn. When we arrived we realised how dead tired we all were, so there was only one thing to do; check-in then hit the town and get our drink on!

Just across the road from hotel was the River Walk, a man-made river with a walk-way down each side. We found ourselves a mexican bar and tested out a jug of margarita before heading to an Irish pub for a few shots of tequila. After adjusting our body clocks with the night out we head back to the hampton for some kip.

The next morning we took full advantage of the Hampton’s breakfast bar before heading out to meet Chris and Carl and his family. We met up and went to have a look around the Alamo where we found a couple of people talking through the equipment of the period, including Bowie knives, Brown bess muskets and various other paraphenalia including bullet making equipment, tobacco and rations.

Esther’s Follies

After the Alamo we went to get some tex-mex before heading off to Austin to check in and get sorted out before heading to Esther’s Follies a comedy show held on 6th Street. I didn’t know what to expect but it was an awesome show, and despite there being a lot of stuff based on topical US politics I really enjoyed it. For me the Magician made it as his act was hilarious and the tricks were top notch too. It also has to be seen to be believed how they use the window behind the stage as part of the show. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend visiting Esther’s follies to anyone next time you’re in Austin.

The Rodeo

On the Friday afternoon a bunch of us headed out to the Rodeo and Carnival. The carnical featured a BBQ cook off where all of the food was free aside from the expectation of donations towards some childrens charities – great for meat eaters less so for vegetarians though there was so I’m told some fried cheese somewhere. The Rodeo was strange. After the announcer thanked George Bush and a prayer was said for the riders. We witnessed Bucking Broncos, Bull riding the whole works. There was even a special kids event with sheep riding, and there was me thinking that sort of thing only happened in Wales.

SXSW interactive panels

This year I found on the whole that I didn’t see any panels that were absolutely incredible or that stood out. I’m thinking though with all of the choices it certainly is possible to be unlucky and I felt this was how it played out for me this year but I’ll be back next year without a doubt.

Of the panels I did see I most enjoyed the “Scaling boot camp panel” for it’s inisght into problems faced with scaling of real sites including Twitter, and the “Design Hurts” Panel with John Gruber and Michael Lopp. I particularly liked John Gruber’s explanation of the apple logo which went something along the lines of:

If you take away the bite it’s just an apple. The bite represents original Sin. When you think about it this makes sense as Apple stands for temptation.

One thing noticeable in all of the panels that I went to there’s a distinct lack of anything remotely technical. I would really like to see more practical presentations next year if possible as otherwise there’s a tendency for panels to get to conceptual, theory based and wishy washy. Cool thing with SXSW is that if you’re not enjoying the particular panel you’ve chosen you can kick back and hack away on something or head out for coffee to geek out with friends old and new.

The Social

It was great to hang out with friends in Austin, the parties were good but sometimes the queues meant foosball in Buffalo Billiards was a better option. The FireEagle bash was great and in particular this year the closing party was awesome, great venue, good tunes, drinks on tap. What more could you ask for except for a trip to the Ihop to round it all of. Cheers Dustin.

I enjoyed meeting lot’s of new faces whilst out and about. I also found that I most enjoy hearing people’s passion for what they do on the web, afterall that’s a big reason why we all head out to Austin year after year and for me that’s reason enough to keep SXSWi on the calendar for next year too.

SXSWi will be upon us faster than a group of web devs heading to the bar. This year to liven things up a bit I’m heading there with Cyril Doussin and Tristan Turpin via Houston and San Antonio before we hit Austin at some point on the Thursday. After which I’ve no doubt you’ll find me attempting to take on the locals at the foosball tables.

This will be my third time in Austin for SXSWi and I couldn’t agree more with the “Guide to SXSW for newbs and veterans”. One thing in particular is to not worry in the slightest about which panels you do or don’t make it to. Best to work out the few you like the sound of, relax and if you don’t find yourself where you though you’d be, just swing by one of the other rooms. Sometimes the most interesting panels are the ones that you just wander into.

The same goes for the evening events, the more unplanned the better

So to assist in unplanning your SXSW I’ve hacked together a ical file for all of the SXSW interactive events using the rather brilliant Beautiful Soup HTML parser.

After downloading the main SXSWi 2008 schedule page, Beautiful soup made it trivial to grab all of the links for the sessions, so that I could then fetch the page for each panel (with a little judicous caching) and then use Beautiful soup again to extract all the necessary details from the markup which contains hcal microformatty goodness. I then wrote this out to a file and the job’s a good’un.

You can either subscribe to the sxswi08 panel schedule ical (.ics) file here OR download it to your desktop as a zip.

Fortunately the evening events page is just a page full of microformats so extracting that to an ical file is a lot more straightforward by using Brian Suda’s x2v – so here’s the sxswi evening events ical (.ics) file and archived as a zip.

If you notice any problems with either ical file then be sure to let me know so I can fix it up.

Lastly if you’re heading over to Austin for SXSWi be sure to say Hi.

Expect the next WSG event organised by Tom and Neil to be announced in the not too distant future. Cheers to both of them for stepping in, I’m sure they’ll do the WSG proud.

The RNIB web access team are putting on a free event at the Westminster University, New Cavendish street campus on Tuesday 5th June at 7pm, where Shawn Lawton Henry of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will speak about WCAG 2.0.

I saw Shawn speak as part of an accessibility panel at SXSW06 and I was impressed that she really got across the practicalities of implementing Accessibility guidelines which is really important to anyone that’s actually going to be building accessible websites.

For more details of the topics that will be covered on the night, visit the event page and sign-up a soon as possible, capacity of the venue is limited.

The venue has been provided thanks to the support of the support of the Department of Electronics, Communications and Software Engineering

Last night’s JavaScript meetup overall turned out to be a great night. Amusingly it was what went wrong that became the catalyst for what was probably the best Q+A session we’ve ever had. It was also great to see that several people had managed to be there from as far afield as Birmingham and Bristol having been in London for meetings.

De-Mystifying Screen readers

Steve Faulkner gave his presentation on De-Mystifying Screen readers. He covered some really interesting information relating in particular to how the buffering in screen readers works and the different problems caused when the buffer fails to update following some kind of change to the content on the page.

Later in Steve’s presentation some technical difficulties occurred making the examples not act as expected. This it seemed was largely thanks to the various versions of JAWS that Steve was running and some bad luck. Still the theory of the test cases was convincing enough and this area is really interesting. It made me think that the more data that is published related to case testing of screenreaders by experts like Steve the easier it will be for web developers to make the most informed decisions to make sites truly accessible for screenreader users.

7 Reasons for bloated code

Christian Heilmann’s presentations was hilarious as usual but at the same time as providing a very upbeat look at avoiding bloated code, Christian managed to look at virtually every aspect of development with some solid examples of where things could go wrong.

I think one of my favourite points was reason #5 Lack of Awareness: where developers will just use JavaScript libraries wherever without necessarily understanding how they work. The particular example was a site where someone was using prototype, jQuery and the YUI all at once because they had just seen a wacky effect and had just hacked those examples into their site. I totally agree that a libraries purpose should be more to rationalise the differences between browser implementations rather than to provide too much functionality. Although I’m obviously biased I think the YUI really nails this aspect on the head.

The Q+A Session

Interestingly some really great questions came out of the Q+A session with the majority of questions directed to Steve and Christian on accessibility in relation to JavaScript.

There was a good point made about Open source screenreaders (I personally think given the failings of the market leaders we really need a firefox of screenreaders to come along to increase competition and encourage standardisation) and someone mentioned the Wikipedia Screen reader comparison page as a good resource on the differences between many of the different screen readers available.

After the event I headed down to the pub for a few beers and spent a while chatting to Alex Robinson about all kinds of geekery.

Thanks to everyone who attended and thanks to both Christian and Steve for presenting. Also a big thank-you to Sean from Westminster University for giving up his time to support the WSG events. Also thanks to the University for allowing us to use their facilities.

Hope to see you at the next one.

Modern web development has certainly evolved such that heavier use of JavaScript has become so much more common-place. This event will give you some important insights that will help you make better use of JavaScript day to day.

This looks to be an exciting evening so I hope to see you there.

As usual the full details are available at the Web Standards Group London mini-site, be sure to register as soon as you can.

• Accessible Flash – Niqui Merret
• Accessibility, What not to do – Ann McMeekin
• Web Accessibility – Mike Davies
• The Accessibility Q&A Session

On other WSG related news I’ve been up to my eyeballs with one thing or another so the WSG meetings are looking to be more likely a quarterly event rather than every 2 months as I originally planned. Another possibility to this is if there is anyone out there who would be interested in helping out on the organisation front so that we can increase the frequency of the events, if that sounds like you let me know.

Finally I am still looking for more speakers for future events, so if you have any great ideas for topic you’d like to hear about or you are a speaker yourself please don’t hesitate to get in touch.