Sometimes bugfixing is a near-zen demonstration of your mad l33t skillz. You stare at the problem for a few seconds, nod sagely and deliver a short flurry of keystrokes. The bug is squashed and the crowd goes wild.
Sometimes.
Last week I did a five-minute lightning talk about ARIA, at Sydjs. The main point was to illustrate a secondary benefit to using ARIA, beyond the primary purpose of accessibility: taking advantage of the standardised definition of state.
The speaking is done, the blankets packed away to save us from the freezing aircon again next year, drinks consumed and planes have returned our friends to various corners of the globe.
It must be time for the Web Directions South 2012 Big Stonking Post™.
Welcome to the Web Directions South 2011 Big Stonking Post™, my rough notes hammered out on a laptop (to aid my own recall) and posted here for your enjoyment.
The usual notes: These are very raw notes - excuse typos, and if you need an exact quote please check the podcast as some of my quotes end up more like paraphrases (I can only type so fast...). Anything marked "Aside:" is my own thought and not something the speaker said.
It's one thing to write code from scratch, but quite another to edit and improve existing code. It's also quite something to have your code dissected in front of a crowd...
Sometimes a simple demo can bring a dry process to life.
Depending on who you talk to, you should have been using HTML5 months, nay years ago; or it's something you might be using in 2022. As usual the truth is somewhere between the glib extremes.