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Just recently The website-lab attended the first DIBI web conference (that’s “Design It, Build it”) held at the famous Sage building about a 10 minute walk from our offices in NewcastleGateshead. The conference brought together some of the UK’s top web design and development talent who were there to talk about their area of expertise.

On arrival, the atmosphere was pretty relaxed, with most dressed fairly casually and enjoying the sweets and treats that had been left for delegates to enjoy throughout the day. Upon registering we were giving a neat little booklet attached to a coloured lanyard, blue for designers and orange for developers, I thought this was a really good idea, it was a great platform to strike up a conversation with and made networking easier.

The conference ran two track, one set of talks for developers and the other for designers. My first port of call was with Elliot Kember and “Pimp your app using jQuery”. Although I didn’t take anything new away with me, it was nice to hear jQuery been discussed with such energy and humour. The website-lab use jQuery fairly heavily in almost all sites we develop because it’s fast, robust and fun to use and so it was nice to see that the majority of delegates at the conference agreed.

Last.fm vs the Xbox wasn’t quite what I expected it to be. It was an excellent introduction into how enterprise size web applications are managed and the points that need to be considered when they expand. This was of particular interest and revelavance to us as The website-lab is currently working on some web applications that are expected to have a high turn over of traffic, hearing about the process involved with scaling large sites and how some of the tools used to manage this left me feel confident, even if we aren’t dealing with some of the scary numbers that Last.fm were! I spoke with David Singleton briefly after his talk, the geek in me really wanted to ask him if he’d been named after the software design pattern but I thought I’d make better use of the time and he recommended learning more about “Squid” as an excellent web cache deamon.

My favourite talk of all was by Michael Bruton-spall, who works for “the guardian” and is basically responsible for keeping the site up and running. The guardian’s website is of course a very high traffic news hub that has thousands of articles, comments and rich media to manage. It was refreshing to see that Michael was still very much enthusiastic and excited about what he does and this came across in his passionate discussion of what it actually takes to keep a site as big as the guardian serving pages even when millions of people are demanding it at the same time. Although The website-lab uses one of the best web hosting companies in the country, this talk has inspired me to dig deeper and learn more about server administration.

The day was a lot of fun and we everyone was well taken care of (even those web developers who needed their caffeine). The tone of the conference said to me “Come and learn but remember to have fun!” The after party gave everyone a chance to relax and reflect on the day, the fun money casino was a great place to meet others and the free bar and top notch food meant everyone was in high spirits. I even managed to catch a moment with a developer who had worked on the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter which left me feeling a little bit star struck, as they are both two frameworks I am very impressed by and use a lot. Over pizza and drinks we met a small group of students who were studying web design at Newcastle College and had attended the conference hoping to learn a bit more about the industry and network. It was a lot of fun hearing about what they were learning and the particular areas that interested them.

I have only managed to highlight a small part of DIBI but I’m pleased to hear they’re planning to do the same thing again next year, as The website-lab’s fist major web industry conference I can confidently say it was a big success and many other delegates shared this sentiment. If you’d like to learn more about the conference you can visit www.dibi.co.uk.

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Last Saturday, I was in the Metro Centre and was having a wander around WHSmith. An interesting front cover of a magazine grabbed my eyes and so I thought I’d investigate. It read “The hackers guide to site security”, now as a security freak I immediately had to pick it up and have a quick read. I had always dismissed .net magazine as a magazine for .net developers, always seemed to me like a bit of niche publication but didn’t give it a second thought.

Pleased I did manage to pick up .net though, it’s just the magazine I’ve always been looking for. The website-lab used to receive Web Designer magazine every month but didn’t have very much in it of interest to me, except for the odd jQuery tutorial it was very much design oriented (more Tom’s stuff).

So, we’ve decided to get ourselves a year subscription to .net. Looking forward to having something to read while I’m eating my egg mayo sandwich!

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Here at The website-lab we think it is very important to reuse and recycle. Just as I reuse code to keep my applications clean and bug free, we also try and reuse and recycle everything we use in the office. We have our own little green policy to help keep our business carbon foot print down, we always cycle to work come rain or shine (or even bad snow), we always take public transport when meeting clients who are outside the Newcastle area and we recycle all paper, metal and plastics! Whenever we pick our lunch up from Morrison’s we always take our own bags!

The picture to the right shows a little of what we got up to this morning. As a web developer, I work on a diet of energy drinks but because I drink so many, we don’t just chuck them out, we put them in a recycle bin and when there’s enough, we crush them all (very noisy business but quite therapeutic) and take them downstairs, where our building has been kind enough to provide a large bin for recyclables!

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