Mile
Zero

Last month, I spoke at the first SeattleJS conference, and talked about how we've developed our tools and philosophy for the Seattle Times interactives team. The slides are available here, if you have trouble reading them on-screen.

I'm pretty happy with how this talk turned out. The first two-thirds were largely given, but the last section went through a lot of revision as I wrote and polished. It originally started as a meditation on training and junior developers, which is an important topic in both journalism and tech. Then it became a long rant about news organizations and native applications. But in the end, it came back to something more positive: how the web is important to journalism, and why I believe that both communities have a lot to gain from mutual education and protection.

In addition to my talk, there are a few others from Seattle JS that I really enjoyed:

• Ashley Williams: JavaScript close to the metal - a typically charming look at abstraction, operating systems, and the web platform
• Steve Kinney: Building musical isntruments with Web Audio - A really funny talk on building and playing a modular synthesizer
• Shagufta Gurmukhdas: Web-based VR - Although I'm still not convinced of the value of WebVR, I do love the way this talk shows how custom elements create a beginner-friendly language for new tech