In mid July Brendan, our Web Development Manager, and I headed up to Wellington to attend the inaugural WDCNZ (Web Developer Conference New Zealand). In brief, it was tech-talks for web developers and my expectations weren’t high. I’m certainly no web developer, but this was a fantastic event. Well organised, with a great mix of high calibre presenters from offshore and within New Zealand. The venue too was great – the Macs Brewbar Function Centre, and some in the office have mentioned this may have been the main reason we wanted to attend, which may hold a small degree of truth.
As I said, I’m no developer but I’m immersed in the web on a daily basis from a design and UX (user experience) point of view and also from a new technologies perspective with the implementation of new features and functionality within the RedSeed platform.
I’m happy to say that the web developer community seems to relish the idea of sharing ideas and actively engaging in discussions about new technologies. Everyone we spoke to were more than happy to share their thoughts around HTML5, CSS, new video technologies and the development approach to mobile apps, whether they were on the side of native or web. These were some of the areas Brendan and I really gained a good insight into the state of this dynamically changing environment and it was great to bounce ideas and issues off some of the fantastic minds attending this event.
We both returned with a comprehensive list of ideas and technologies we want to explore and I’m sure we’ll see the fruits from our attendance at WDCNZ flowing through to RedSeed in the coming months.
A big thanks to xero for sponsoring the event and the Trademe guys for the free wifi. Speaking of Trademe – we even had the opportunity the following day to have a guided tour and a Q&A session with some of their web and operations team; fascinating, but that’s another story….
But back to WDCNZ – we can’t wait till next years event.
