Speakers

James is a Ruby developer for Reevoo, and has been developing using Ruby since 2001. He is one of the primary instigators of the London Ruby User Group and has presented to Ruby and Rails developers in Vancouver, London, Santa Clara and Portland.

He’s been an active member of the Rails community since its inception, is the developer behind the Engines plugin and the author of Rails Plugins. He pretends not to have a blog at interblah.net.

Presenting Exploring the Server Side: Rails

Rachel Andrew is a web developer and author. Along with Drew McLellan she is Director of UK web development consultancy edgeofmyseat.com, doing front and back-end web development for design agencies.

She is author of a number of books including The CSS Anthology published by Sitepoint, and also writes for various magazines and publications. She is also a member of The Web Standards Project and tries to encourage a common sense application of best practice and standards adoption in her own work and when writing about the web.

Business and Management: Communicating Best Practices panellist

Matt Biddulph is the nomadic CTO of Dopplr, the social network for intelligent travellers. He started out in 1994 building search engines on CD-ROM, and now specialises in digital media, social software and putting data on the web. In past lives he was a creative technologist for hire, working with companies like Nature, Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.

Presenting For Example: Dopplr

Paul Boag has been working on the web since 1993. He is a user experience consultant for Headscape Ltd, a web design agency that he founded back in 2002. He typically works on large institutional websites including government agencies, higher education institutions and heritage organisations.

As well as being a frequent speaker and writing for various publications, Paul is well known for producing and hosting the longest running web design podcast at boagworld.com.

Business and Management: Communicating Best Practices panellist

A self-confessed ‘user experience professional’, James works for Clearleft in the jolly seaside town of Brighton, England. Part information architect and part interaction designer, when he’s not crafting sandcastles on the beach, James crafts websites that are fun and easy to use.

Thinking about who he’s worked with makes him feel old and grumpy. But give him a few drinks and he’ll prattle on about his work as a Government agent (DirectGov and the HMRC), his telly-box contacts (like the BBC and Channel 4) or how he remembers when all these social networks were just fields…

Presenting For Example: Clear Left

Andy Budd is a user experience designer and web standards developer living and working in Brighton, England. As the creative director of web design consultancy Clearleft, Andy enjoys building attractive, accessible and standards compliant websites.

He is also the author of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, a regular speaker at international design conferences, workshops and training events, and writes about modern web design practices at his online home, andybudd.com.

Session TBC

Andy Clarke has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design consultancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and creative director, his clients include local and national businesses, charities and government bodies and he has designed for The British Heart Foundation, Disney Store UK, Save The Children and WWF UK.

Andy is a member of the Web Standards Project where he redesigned the organisation’s web site in 2006. He is also an Invited Expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy regularly speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide and is the author of Transcending CSS (New Riders).

Session TBC

As W3C Internationalisation Activity Lead, Richard Ishida’s job is to ensure universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture.

Richard is much in demand as a speaker, as his talks combine fascinating examples with clear and very practical recommendations. For 15 years his seminars and consultancy have helped developers around the world understand how to create websites, documents, and on-screen information that can be easily adapted for international users when the time comes. His talks draw on his earlier background in translation and interpreting, computational linguistics, translation tools, and his knowledge of numerous languages and writing systems.

Presenting Global Design: Characters, Language, and More

A content strategist and senior writer for Apple.com, Bronwyn Jones has worked as a marketing copywriter for more than ten years, writing about everything from off-road motorcycles to lingerie. Featured in A List Apart and The New Writer’s Handbook 2008, Bronwyn wants to spread the good word about good words on the web. She enjoys Britpop, agitprop, and cookies with butterscotch chips. Read about her thoughts on web content (and about that time she tried to get on TV with Morrissey) at presentimperfect.com. Bronwyn lives in San Francisco, California.

Presenting The Book Was Better: Writing as Source Material for Web Design

Nate Koechley is a Yahoo front-end engineer and designer based in San Francisco.

When he’s not helping design and build the open-source Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library he edits the YUIBlog, promotes accessibility, defines Yahoo browser support policies, writes occasionally at his personal blog, and presents at conferences around the globe.

Presenting Professional Front-End Engineering

Stuart Langridge is quite possibly the only person in the world to have a BSc in Computer Science and Philosophy. When he’s not fiddling about with computers, he’s an information architect, author of SitePoint’s DHTML Utopia, a member of the WaSP’s Scripting Task Force, and a drinker of decent beers. He’s also one-quarter of the team at LugRadio, the world’s premiere Free and Open Source Software radio show.

Presenting Exploring the Server-side: Beyond 404

Patrick currently works as Web Editor for the University of Salford, where, in 2003, he implemented one of the first web standards based university sites.

One of the best-known exponents of web accessibility, Patrick helps to run Accessify.com, is co-lead of the Web Standards Project Accessibility Task Force, and is co-author of Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance (Friends of Ed).

Business and Management: Communicating Best Practices panellist

Biog coming soon.

Presenting For Example: The Guardian

John Resig is a JavaScript evangelist working for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. He’s currently located in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Presenting The Why and Which of JavaScript Libraries

Murray was the first person to promote and implement web standards within Yahoo Europe and as Head of Web Development for the company he built a strong web standards-focussed development team that gained a strong reputation and a lot of respect within Yahoo, and beyond.

After more than seven years at Yahoo, Murray sought new challenges and joined GCAP Media as Director of Product Development in December of last year.

Business and Management: Communicating Best Practices panellist

Web designer and developer, Jonathan Snook moves effortlessly from client-side, front-end work to hardcore server-side challenges, and his fluency in CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL make make him the “turn-to” man for many high-profile clients.

Co-author of Accelerated DOM Scripting and The Art and Science of CSS, he writes regularly at his popular blog snook.ca, and for Digital Web and Sitepoint.

Jonathan also works with his partners at Sidebar Creative, makers of world-class websites and innovative applications.

Presenting Building on the Shoulders of Giants

Simon Willison is a freelance client- and server-side Web developer and a co-creator of the Django Web framework. Simon’s interests include OpenID and decentralised systems, unobtrusive JavaScript and rapid application development. Before going freelance Simon worked on Yahoo’s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas. Simon maintains a popular Web development weblog at simonwillison.net.

Presenting Exploring the Server-side: Django

After 10 years of consulting, Indi founded Adaptive Path with six other partners, all hoping to spread good design around the world, making things easier for people everywhere. Indi’s mental models have helped both start-ups and large corporations discover and support customer behaviours they didn’t think to explore at first. She has written a book about the mental model method, Mental Models - Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, published by Rosenfeld Media. She is now consulting independently, conducting mental model workshops, and mentoring.

Presenting Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy