Cal Freitas

I am an Engineering Manager at PublicSquare. I am a Principal Front-End Engineer by trade. At Swarzy, I built Verses for Life and Psalmlist.

Notes from W3C Conference 2011 (W3Conf)

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The first W3Conf occurred on November 15 and 16, 2011, in Redmond, Washington. It focused on practical standards for web professionals, HTML5, and the open web platform.

Below, I have a list of the presenters and links to the slides (where available). You can watch videos of the presentations. (Currently, this includes Day 1 speakers; I’ll be adding Day 2 speakers and links soon.)

Presenters, Topics, and Slides
Testing to Perfection
Philippe Le Hegaret (W3C)

W3C Community Groups
Manu Sporny (Digital Bazaar)

Shortcuts: Developer Resources
Doug Schepers (W3C)

6 CSS Magic Potions for your Layout Troubles from the Future
Divya Manian (Opera)

Web Graphics: A Large Creative Palette
Vincent Hardy (Adobe)

Web Performance: Making the Web Faster
Arvind Jain (Google)

Shortcuts: Getting Offline with the HTML5 Appcache
John Allsopp

N-Screens: Building apps in a world of TV & Mobile
Rajesh Lal (Nokia)

The Great HTML5 Divide: How polyfills and shims let you light up your sites in non-modern browsers
Rey Bango

Shortcuts: Web Typography
Christopher Slye (Adobe)

HTML5: The Foundation of the Web Platform
Paul Irish (Google)

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Favorite Quotes from “Poke the Box” by Seth Godin

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Poke the BoxSeth Godin writes a manifesto in “Poke the Box” which exists to say primarily one thing: “Make something happen.”

He focuses heavily on initiative, its relevance, and diagnosing many reasons people don’t take initiative. He also discusses its importance in the economy.

Godin wrote this manifest such that it’s simple to read, easy to ingest, and full of quotable bites. At a length of 85 pages, the book is readable in two to three hours.

My favorite quotes from “Poke the Box”:

“So, if money and access and organizational might aren’t the foundation of the connected economy, what is?

Initiative.”

“Excellence… is about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.”

“The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity…”

“The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.”

“The relentless act of invention and innovation and initiative is the best marketing asset.”

“It’s easy to fall so in love with the idea of starting that we never actually start.”

“Sure, ideas that spread, win, but ideas that don’t get spoken always fail.”

Get a copy of Poke the Box on Amazon.com.

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Mobile Web Development

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The mobile web is important to target as internet users increasingly access websites via smartphones and other mobile devices.

When developing for mobile devices, a couple main alternatives present themselves:

  • target each device individually (a separate app for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.)
  • target each device with a mobile website which functions on multiple platforms/browsers

A number of frameworks have begun to emerge in this space to ease the process of developing mobile sites with cross-platform support.

Frameworks for Mobile Website Development:

Each of these frameworks take different approaches, but their end goals are the same: make it easy for web developers to provide a good user experience for their website or web application on a wide range of mobile devices. If you’re looking to do so, I’d recommend looking into these three mobile frameworks as potential solutions.

I had the opportunity today to hear from several speakers including Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!), James Pearce (Sencha), Tom Dale (SproutCore), and Dan Heberden (jQuery).

I’m including links to slides from some of the talks and I’ll add others as they’re made available.

High Performance JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas

Building cross platform mobile web apps by James Pearce

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