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.

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.

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

Tom is a senior client side developer for the BBC in London, where he has spent the last two years jumping between a variety of projects including the iPlayer and the BBC Homepage.

His specialist subjects include building modern websites on antiquated infrastructures, real world accessibility and ski touring. He also likes mountain biking and making pastry.

Presenting For Example: BBC Home page

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).

Presenting Underpants Over My Trousers

Hannah Donovan has been the Creative Director at Last.fm since 2006. Originally from Canada’s icy north, Hannah obtained a Bachelor of Design from the University of Alberta where she cut her teeth on the web instead of going outside. Since then she’s worked on everything from chocolate bar wrappers to wireframes. When she’s not immersed in design, Hannah draws monsters.

Advertising: Design with it, or around it? panellist

Steve is the Senior Web Accessibility Consultant and Technical Director at The Paciello Group Europe. He was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at Vision Australia.

He is also the Director of The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) for which he has worked with many individuals and organisations around the world to provide localized versions of the WAT-C web accessibility testing tools. He is the creator and lead developer of the Web Accessibility Toolbar (WAT) and co-developer of the Color Contrast Analyser (CCA).

Steve researches, presents and writes articles on how assistive technology works with technologies such as JavaScript, AJAX and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI- ARIA)

Presenting WAI-ARIA: It’s Easy

James is an Astrophysics PhD student at the University of Cambridge. When he’s not doing that, however, he spends his time helping out with the development of HTML5, and has been a long term contributor to the WHAT WG, and, more recently, the W3C HTML WG. He is one of the primary authors of html5lib, a HTML5-compliant HTML parsing library written in Python.

Presenting Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5

Lachlan Hunt worked as a front-end web developer, primarily developing with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for the past 4 years until joining Opera Software in 2007.

As a developer and advocate of web standards, he has participated in the WHATWG and various W3C working groups, including Web API, Web Application Formats and HTML Working Groups, where he actively contributes to the work on HTML5.

Presenting Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5

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).

Communicating Best Practices panellist

Marc has worked on a wide variety of standards-compliant web sites for the likes of Unilever, BT, Sky, and Halifax, and with agency LBi.

He joined The Guardian in 2006 to work on their R2 project, the aim of which was to move the entire guardian.co.uk website to a modern, robust platform. As the team has grown his role has shifted away from coding and towards focusing on ways to make the templates and CSS both manageable and maintainable.

Presenting For Example: The Guardian

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 and is currently Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com. Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net.

He is now a strong advocate for best practises, and is currently Group Lead for The Web Standards Project. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement. He writes at allinthehead.com and, with a little help from his friends, at 24ways.org.

Presenting Content Management Without the Killing

Steve Pearce is Design Director at Poke. His friends call him Buzz, but that’s another story altogether. He’s worked with loads of clients of all shapes and sizes, and has helped make their websites better - both for the users and the business.

He’s won his fair share of awards from Webbys to a BAFTA, and talked at various conferences, but his real passion is creating things that both look good and work well, and make people smile.

He loves talking design and telling stories. He doesn’t like Comic Sans or baked beans.

Advertising: Design with it, or around it? panellist

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

Claire has been a Client Side Developer at the BBC since 2006. Whilst at the BBC Claire has worked on the iPlayer Download Manager and is currently developing the homepage. Claire can mostly be found coding OO JavaScript, writing worryingly complex .htaccess files and squeezing every spare byte out of her files to spare the BBC servers.

Presenting For Example: BBC Home page

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.

Communicating Best Practices panellist

Dan is a highly accomplished user interface designer and usability consultant, with over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of web standards and usability.

In addition to his contributions to sites including Blogger, the CSS Zen Garden, Yahoo Small Business and Microsoft’s ASP.net portal, Dan is a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (2nd Edition, Friends of ED, 2003), a technical reviewer for Beginning CSS Web Development (Apress, 2006) and The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint, 2007), coauthor of Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006), and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007), writes about web standards, design and life in general on his blog, SuperfluousBanter.org, and spends his professional time on a variety of online and offline projects for Sidebar Creative and Black Seagull.

Presenting Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference

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

Jeffrey Veen was one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and creator of Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006. After five years with Adaptive Path, Jeff moved on to Google, where he lead the redesign of their Analytics product and managed their web apps UX team. He left Google in May, 2008, to work on personal projects.

Jeffrey is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and user experience consultant. As a consultant, Jeffrey has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and more. Previously, Jeffrey served as the Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos Inc., where he managed the look and feel of HotWired, the HotBot search engine, Lycos.com and others.

Presenting Designing Our Way Through Data

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