“Seeing people enthusiastic about things”
- Nick Jackson, University of Lincoln

“Being in the company of lots of geeks”
- Jamie Mahoney, University of Lincoln

“Julian presenting Family Fortunes”
– Mark Johnson, Taunton’s College

“The lolz”
– Julian Cheal, UKOLN

“It’s a conference but also a giant workshop”
– Joss Winn, University of Lincoln

“Cheesecake and 3D printing”
- Phil Stugeon, HappyNinjas

“The people”
- Harro Verton, FuelPHP

“Hearing what people are working on and learning what’s up and coming”
– Thom Bunting, UKOLN

“The really nice dinner lady”
- Asad Haider, Laurus Media

“The food was really good… seriously. And UCL is just a fantastic university”
- Phil Raymonds

“I like that I can crack a really nerdy joke and everyone understands it”
- James Ravenscroft, IBM

“The JLeRN challange, text mining and the geospacial things”
- Bharti Gupta and Neeta Patel

“Python dojo, closely followed by image glitching”
- David Moulton

Wordcloud generated here.

What brought you to Dev8D?

I’ve come for the last few last years. I work in a pretty small team and it’s good to find, meet up with and gain from other people’s experience.

What do you hope people got out of your session?

A simple awareness of some of the issues when you start text mining. The essence of it is to extract and analyse data from documents. Connected Histories (a collection of digital historical resources) use data mining to identify people and places throughout a huge database.

What have you been looking at around Dev8D 2012?

I found the HTML 5 talk really interesting and I also went to a session on sustainable code which was really enjoyable. I find it really useful that there’s such a wide range of techniques being showcased here.

What have you gained from Dev8D?

Last year I heard talk from MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives) and now directly working with them thanks to the relationship created at Dev8D.

I think building those relationships and understanding what’s out there is very important. I’d also like to see more people without the technical knowledge here. MLA had problems to work through and Dev8D was the perfect place to come and find answers.

Where did the idea come from?

It was whilst we were planning DevXS in Lincoln. We were looking for ways to award the little things that people do as well as the main awards.

It came from the idea of having actual stickers to give out. For example, if you were a HTML expert you’d stick a badge on yourself and people would know this. Then it developed into the much simpler system we’ve got now.

How does it work?

It’s been a working progress since the start of the conference. We’ve been adding different features as we’ve gone along. Today we added the ability to give out workshop specific badges after it was requested by one of the speakers.

Essentially, if you do something good, you get a badge. It works like Xbox or Steam achievements. Various organisers, as well as the media team, are allowed to give out a mixture of badges.

During DevXS I found that people were saying “how can I get different ones?”. It gets people doing a wide range of things at the conference just to get these little virtual electronic tokens.

What’s your favourite badge?

I really like the silly ones… things that everyone does, like forgetting power cables. That’s the Powerless badge. Another of my favourites was the Dev8D Widow(er) badge which you receive if you ‘abandoned’ your partner on Valentine’s Day to attend the conference.

“There’s these wonderful users having problems with websites and then they’ll sit out there and not say a thing.” – EA Draffen

During the session Draffen and Skuse showed a variety of websites and where they were going wrong. The “curse of ‘click here’” should be noted: The simple act of correctly labelling links is something that is forgotten far too often.

“We’ve got to think multimedia, it’s not just screenreaders you need to worry about… it’s everybody.” – E.A. Draffen

Draffen and Skuse showed how using a Firefox add-on called WAVE, developers can check for accessibility errors on any webpage. It was interesting to note that Claroread, an accessibility company, has a notably large amount of errors and Livejournal, voted one of the best social network sites in a survey done by Southampton University) had some simple errors too.

Top Tips

Below is a round-up of tips given throughout the Dev8D session.

1. There are two tasks as a web developer and one of those is actually training your ‘content people’.
2. Just remember to put a little bit of thought in when you’re building the site.
3. Don’t overkill. Too many descriptions will end up being very repetitive when using a screenreader.
4. Make sure links are “precise and concise”.
5. You must enable the users to have the technology rather than forcing it upon them. If it’s truly accessible you should be easy to find the site, there should be improved statistics and your brand should build a reputation for being highly accessible.

Movement tracking and the AR Drone

The AR Drone is already a nifty bit of kit and so is the Microsoft Kinect but put those two things together in a room with a handful of developers and you get something a lot more interesting.

A team from Southampton University has set up a Kinect so that it works happily through a laptop showing a visual display of the data it receives (right). Usually controlled by an iOS or Android device the AR Drone is now configured to work using the Kinect’s motion tracking. Keep an eye out in The Venue for demonstrations during the rest of the conference.

Graham Klyne from Oxford University demonstrated a 3D printer in (eventual) full working order. The RepRap is a self-replicating machine with the ability to print off many of the parts needed for it’s own construction.

According to Graham this low-cost technology is a brilliant way of “putting these capabilities into the hands of ordinary people as opposed to major corporations with big budgets.”

Check out the video feature and interview with Graham here.

From the same University responsible for the Kinect controlled AR Drone comes a collection of perspex, duct tape, tracing paper, a projector, a PlayStation Eye and some smart programming that are worth much more than the sum of their parts.

This is a touch table that, using infrared light running through a sheet of perspex and a PlayStation Eye, detects touch and allows the user to draw using a simple MS Paint-like program.

10 times faster and 30 times more memory than an Arduino there are more than three of these for every single human being on the planet. This tiny device has a microphone, accelerometer and simply plugs into your computer via USB.

These have the capability for a wide range of functions from electronic musical instruments to toy cats that purr when you hold them in a certain way.

Gary Bulmer was demonstrating the devices along with the simpler Ardunios throughout the day and affectionally refers to them as “an electronic surface for your brain to play on.”

What brings you to Dev8D?

There’s just me on the staff in Southampton so these kinds of conferences are a rare opportunity for me to be able to network. You meet people who may have solved problems you may have and it’s a fantastic way of collaborating on possible ideas. For me, it’s also an excellent opportunity for training that I wouldn’t usually get.

Being with other developers is a real moral booster. My employers tend to look at my work with a blank face, so long as it does the job. Here other developers will understand what I’ve done… tell me how to improve it… whether it’s good – you get validation for your work.

What will your workshop be about?

Tomorrow morning I’ll be running a workshop on Moodle plugins, which will take the form of a ‘code-along’ session where I’ll be writing a plugin along with everyone, showing them what to do, and different ways to extend the functionality of Moodle.

This is your third year at Dev8D, how has it changed?

Well, lunch isn’t on time; it was on time last year.

Really, it just seems to get bigger and bigger every year. Last year it was two day event with an optional third day. Every year there’s more people, different people. There’s so many developers that I know solely from coming to Dev8D. In the first year I spent most of the week working on one of the challenges. Essentially you’re told, “do something interesting with this system” and then the best gets a prize. This year I’ve seen a challenge that focused on learning tools that I want to be involved with. Last year I didn’t risk spending all week on a challenge and tried to go to as many workshops as possible.

What are you interested in at this year’s conference?

I’m looking at updating the student note system on Taunton College’s Moodle and I know the developers from the University of London Computer Centre who created the system will be here this year. I’m hoping to collaborate with them and help to improve and develop the system.

What brought you to Dev8D?

There’s a lot of open data stuff happening which is something we’re really interested in back in Oxford.

What do you hope people got out of your workshop?

I think the knowledge of where to go to develop their skills. Not to know how to do it but know how to further expand their knowledge. Where to go and what to look for when learning these new skills.

What do you hope to take back to Oxford from Dev8D?

Networking, taking back contacts. I saved a lot of time since last year’s conference by going to people “it’s not working, help me”. Knowing the people you’ve seen on the web are going to be there is great for solving problems.