I spent yesterday at UnSheffield, and I've got to admit, I had a great time. I kicked the sessions off by attending a talk on content for mobile phones, which was chaired by Mike Smith. We had some good ideas, mainly focused on data being provided as RSS and the phone handling presentation itself - aswell as some discussion on cool technology such as projecting the phone screen onto a surface, and interacting with the phone via voice.

After such a good first session, I got talking to @richardathome [A web developer in Sheffield] and Lisa Hall [Ex-Sheffield Uni researcher, currently in recruitment] about a variety of different things - we eventually settled on Computing in education, and how new graduates are technically skilled, but aren't being taught to think about a problem and solve it.

Our chat lasted for almost another session, after which I signed up to do a talk in the afternoon. My first talk at Barcamp Leeds kind of crashed and burned, so I was hoping for it to go a bit more smoothly this time. However, I was determined not to just show pre-written code, as that doesn't show how easy jQuery is. I eventually presented a live demo of jQuery, starting with an empty file. I spent the next hour or so testing code that I was going to write live in the session to make sure I could remember how to do it, and was pretty much done when Joel Gascoigne reminded me that I could also use Firebug to manipulate the DOM. Firebug made the session a lot more interactive, so cheers Joel.

Joel ran a session on filtering your social streams, and data overload online. He also provided a little disclaimer that his startup, OnePage, is intending to address this problem. After a brief sales pitch, the session turned into a discussion by the attendees. There was a definite split in people who want to share information with everyone, and people who want to selectively share (e.g. keep LinkedIn and Twitter seperate). They argued that making it that easy for people to mash all their data together is dangerous. For example, one guy caught his daughter out after she said she was going to one place, then tweeted from another. However, I believe that's the responsibility of the user, and not the site - filtering what information you put online.
The session concluded with a discussion on showcasing content. Although OnePage is a stream of information, people would like to feature their best posts/tweets/photos as it shows them off best. Another angle was suggested, about aggregating multiples people's data on one page, not just one person with multiple services. It would be useful for following a sales team, for example, in one place - via twitter or facebook statuses. Overall, a fairly interesting topic.

I presented my session after Joel, and quite a few people stuck around/turned up. I'd guess at about 15-20 people in the room watching. I was quite nervous after my last talk failed, but decided to give it my best shot anyway. It all worked [almost] perfectly first time, and I enjoyed the session. As I can't review my own session, here's one from Paul Brabban who blogged the session as it happened.

Michael starts by intoducing jQuery, a Javascript library designed to provide functionality based on CSS selectors and lift the burden of cross-browser incompatibility from the programmer.

Michael’s bravely doing live demonstration of the functionality of jQuery, using Firefox and the Firebug plugin. He builds an HTML table and demonstrates the capability to modify the CSS styling of the table rows based on selectors, switching on zebra-striping, selecting a specific row by index and selecting an element by pattern matching part of an ID.

This kind of manipulation is difficult to do and very error-prone in raw Javascript. Using jQuery takes the complexity away and can make these changes in a single line of code, that Michael’s editing on the fly.

Looking around the room, there’s a wall of laptop and netbook lids open with folks trying out what Michael’s demonstrating and twittering about it.

He then moves on to show how functions can be easily defined in jQuery and bound to events that may occur in the browser. He pops up an alert window when the user clicks on an element in the HTML document.

It’s a great demonstration of the ease of programming in jQuery. Michael was taking questions during the demonstration and adapting the demonstration quickly to provide an answer.

In the next part of his demo, Michael demonstrates how quickly and easily simple web services can be used within jQuery, when he requests a chunk of JSON data from a webpage and logs the output to the console. In three lines of code - if you include the line with the closing brace, bracket and semicolon.

To add context to the request based on the element that was clicked, we’re looking at a couple more lines of code. Now, we have a list of elements being created on the fly in the document. He’s not happy with the results jerkily snapping out, so he adds an extra line of code which smoothly slides out the new elements.

As he says, that functionality is moving towards a practically useful application.

He finishes with questions. Me: why jQuery over other Javascript frameworks? Michael responds that the frameworks tend to have specialities, but jQuery has a small footprint and is very easy to use. It can also be used in conjunction with other frameworks.

He also mentions that jQuery has a thriving community producing plugins and documentation.

Steve Frost mentions confused.com - they recently introduced jQuery to the website and ‘made it tens times more usable for 19k banwidth’.

Round the room, it’s pretty clear that we’ve been blown away. A great session.

I couldn't have asked for better feedback, it's a great confidence boost and I'm already trying to think of more sessions to present at my next barcamp.

The day ended with a talk on HumanHacking by Ian Forrester from the BBC. It was all about how to manipulate people to get what you want, from ignoring someone who disagrees with you in a meeting (very subtley) to the Nigerian 401 scammers. After we'd discussed some of the ways to hack people. the discussion moved onto why it's so easy, including banks asking for details over the phone, and internet banking being so insecure. (World of Warcraft has 2 factor authentication, Online banking doesn't) The general consensus was that people needed to be more educated about online scams, and that the scams wouldn't stop any time soon, as the scammers only need 1 person in 10 million to fall for it, and they make a lot of cash.

So there we go, my writeup of UnSheffield. It's a bit long, but I enjoyed it all and didn't want to miss any of it out. I think come September, I may be venturing over to Geekup Sheffield once a month, and socialising with an entirely new set of people

Related posts:

1. PHPNW09 – 10th & 11th October 2009
2. PHPNW09
3. Barcamp Blackpool
4. FOWD Tour Leeds
5. Think Visibility