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Several years ago, Shine launched its first AWS EC2 instance. We quickly discovered that the main difference with using AWS wasn't the obvious cost and uptime improvements. What we realised instead was that AWS would change the way we would approach the development and deployment life...

OSDC2013 and WDS2013 back to back

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend two conferences back to back: Open Source Developer’s Conference 2013 in Auckland, and Web Directions South 2013 in Sydney. Being in a profession where I am sitting in front of a desk all day, going on the road for a week mixed things up quite a bit. Plus, preparing to talk at one added to the stress, and to the lack of sleep. What a great experience though, I have been put through an accelerated learning curve on a diverse range of topics. They ranged from the very technical, such as dissecting the GPU’s role in rendering CSS using layers; to the more fun, such as how to generate a choose-you-own-adventure game in pastebin; to the unexpected such as a crash course on 3D modelling using Blendr.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="650"] Shine Principal Adam Kierce and UX Lead Sri Elkins celebrate at the awards ceremony[/caption] We're excited and proud to announce that we've won in two categories at the 2013 Australian Mobile Awards! We won an award in the 'Productivity App' category for Teamstuff, an...

javaone_2

This year July 24-27 I was invited to speak at the first JavaOne conference held in Shanghai, China. Over the four days the conference delivered a concentrated dose of Java and helped me get a good overview of the current state of Java across all versions. It also showed that the divide between where Oracle thinks Java is going and the reality as I see it day-to-day is getting bigger, with Oracle selling the image of a bright future for Java where I see Java slowly loosing ground against other programming languages.

melbjs MelbJS held an event last Wednesday, and the turnout was amazing in spite of the dreary weather. If I recall rightly, it was the biggest turnout for this event to date. It must have been the impressive line up of speakers:  there were full presentations by Neil Jenkins, James A Rosen, and Ryan Seddon, and a couple of lightning talks by Tommy-Carlos Williams and Mark Brown. In this post I'm going to cover a couple of talks that I found interesting.