Check out the mobile-friendly version of our schedule here.
The inaugural Whisky Web conference kicks off in Edinburgh on the 13th and 14th of April 2012. A web conference created for the web community, by the web community, Whisky Web will have something to offer everyone who works with the web, be they a designer, a developer or something in between. This is an amazing opportunity to get your geek on in Scotland's inspiring capital.
Hackathon schedule has now been updated.
While there are a great many web-related conferences throughout the UK, few are held in Scotland. In recent years we've seen The Highland Fling and the Turing Festival put Edinburgh on the conference map, and Whisky Web hopes to capitalize on their success in bringing more exciting and awesome talks to a new Scottish web conference.
Whisky Web will cover a broad range of subject areas, with a key focus on what makes the web great. We'll be language agnostic; we won't focus on a particular development paradigm, nor will we concentrate on front-end design over back-end coding. We want to be inclusive, and while it's very difficult to be all things to all people, we hope to have a good shot at it!
You don't need to like a dram of whisky, (but it might help!) and you don't need to know your haggis, neeps and tatties from your cock-a-leekie – if you care about the web and want to hear passionate speakers wax lyrical about topics close to their hearts, and yours, get a ticket and get to Scotland this Spring!
Bruichladdich are teaming up with Whisky Web to deliver an overview of the world of Scotch Whisky accompanied of course by four of their wonderful spirits.
Join Craig Johnstone (@WhiskyCraig) from Bruichladdich as he guides us through the history of Scotch Whisky from humble beginnings to modernization through the peaks and troughs of the 20th Century ending up in the multi billion pound industry we see today. Learn of Bruichladdich, the one company out there doing things differently and experience first hand the craftsmanship and passion that goes in to building the most exciting and independent of Islay Single Malt Whiskies.
Inspired by Whiskeymar.ch, the organisers of Whisky Web would like to invite delegates and speakers to join them for a little pre-conference socialising on Thursday 12 April.
Having sought Craig's advice on some central Edinburgh bars that offer a wide variety of Whiskies, we've put together a short tour of those fine establishments so that we can all meet up before the main event. We'll get started at the first bar around 19:30 but keep an eye out for hashtag #whiskywebsocial to check where we are!
The Hub is situated on Castlehill, adjacent to Edinburgh Castle in the very heart of Edinburgh's historic Old Town. It is less than half a mile from Waverley train station and 7 miles from Edinburgh International Airport.
Paid on street and disabled parking is available on Johnston Terrace and there is an NCP car park located on Castle Terrace which is a short walk from The Hub.
Contact details
The Hub, Castlehill, Edinburgh EH1 2NE
Tel: +44(0)131 473 2015
www.thehub-edinburgh.com
The Hackathon will be taking place at Out Dynamic Earth. Primarily an exhibit and interactive experience charting the history of our planet, Our Dyanmic Earth also provides conference and event facilities.
Situated a short distance from Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament building, the Hackathon venue is also a short distance away from the St John's Hill NCP car park.
Contact details
Our Dynamic Earth, 112-116 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS
Tel: +44(0)131 550 7800
www.dynamicearth.co.uk
While Whisky Web are not affiliated with the establishments shown below, we thought it might be useful to our delegates and speakers to provide some details of local hotels that are a short distance from the main conference venue.
Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft Ireland as an Architect Evangelist. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies.
Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on web technologies on the Microsoft stack such as ASP.NET, PHP, IronRuby, JavaScript and more. Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at http://www.joshholmes.com.
@joshholmes
David Zülke is the lead developer of the Agavi project, an open source MVC framework for PHP, and managing director at Bitextender GmbH, a Munich, Germany based software company. He has been doing PHP development for more than ten years and regularly speaks at conferences around the world about lovely topics like HTTP, REST, CouchDB, MapReduce and, of course, PHP.
@dzuelke
Derick Rethans has contributed in a number of ways to the PHP project, including the Xdebug debugging tool, the mcrypt, date and input-filter extensions, bug fixes, additions and leading the QA team.
He's a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. Derick speciality is PHP internals and extensions. He's now working with 10gen to help improve the MongoDB PHP driver. In his spare time he likes to travel, hike, ski and practise photography.
@derickr
Bastian is a Software Engineer at ResearchGate, the leading social network for scientists, working there on everything API related. Before that he was responsible for the integration of OpenSocial, OAuth, OpenID and other open standards into the largest german based social networks.
He is also a frequent speaker on international web technology conferences, always trying to promote open standards and protocols. This, together with his activity in the OpenSocial foundation and as a committer and PMC member for the Apache Shindig project makes him a strong advocate for the vision of an truly open and distributed social web.
@BastianHofmann
Brian Suda is an informatician currently residing in Reykjavík,
Iceland. He has spent a good portion of each day connected to Internet
after discovering it back in the mid-01990s.
Most recently, he has
been focusing more on the mobile space and future predictions.
How
smaller devices will augment our every day life and what that means to
the way we live, work and are entertained. People will have access to
more information, so how do we present this in a way that they can
begin to understand and make informed decisions about things they
encounter in their daily life. This could include better
visualizations of data, interactions, work-flows and ethnographic
studies of how we relate to these digital objects.
His own little patch of Internet can be found at suda.co.uk where many
of his past projects and crazy ideas can be found.
John Mertic is a software engineer at SugarCRM, and has several years of experience with PHP web applications. At SugarCRM, he has specialized in data integration, mobile and user interface architecture.
An avid writer, he has been published in php|architect, IBM Developerworks, and in the Apple Developer Connector, and is the author of the book ‘The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications’. He has also contributed to many open source projects, most notably the PHP project where is the creator and maintainer of the PHP Windows Installer.
@jmertic
Joshua Thijssen is a freelance consultant, developer and system administrator. His daily work consists of maintaining code bases, working on different projects and helping other to achieve higher standards in both coding and thinking.
His passion lies in high-end and complex internet systems and clusters, code optimization, server administration and fine-tuning. His programming skills includes (but is not limited to) assembly, C, C++, Java, Perl, Python and PHP and has experience on a wide range of operating systems. One of his specialties is fine tuning MySQL databases and queries. His personal tech blog can be found on http://www.adayinthelifeof.nl.
@JayTaph
Kevinjohn Gallagher is an executive-level Business Transformation Consultant for underground Scottish agency Pure Web brilliant.
A passionate advocate of Open Source Software, Kevinjohn strongly believes in the power of a pragmatic Agile approach.
In the past he’s worked at Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, BBC, BP, 2 financial institutions and 3 National Governments – as well as 8 of the top 25 European agencies (and 3 of the World’s top 5 "digital agencies of the decade").
Kevinjohn’s also delivered products and services for: Oxfam, Burberry, American Express, Yahoo, EFF, Guardian media, Endemol, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Ladbrokes, MTV, Adobe, Audi, Orange, William Hill, Vodafone, AT&T, Sky, BT and Burger King.
Finally, he’s worked for every Agency in the NMAtop100 that isn’t based in London.
The down-side? He’s a little blunt.
With a personal mission to "Improve the value of information on the Web". Mike Amundsen’s current work focuses on implementing evolvable applications on the WWW. His latest book is "Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node" and he has authored more than a dozen books on programming over the last 15 years.
An internationally known author and lecturer, Mike Amundsen travels throughout the United States and Europe consulting and speaking on a wide range of topics including distributed network architecture, Web application development, Cloud computing, and other subjects.
His current book project focuses on the "cloud programming stack" and start-up culture in the San Francisco Bay area.
Rowan is a technical team lead at Ibuildings and holds a Master's degree in Software Engineering. He's worked commercially with PHP for over 6 years, before that Python and Java, and then Pascal and BASIC if you go back far enough.
His work has encompassed everything from tiny interactive pages through to multi-million pound billing engines using a wide variety of open source technologies. His passions including continual tinkering with his aging N900 and poor-quality horror films.
@rowan_m
I have over 10 years of experience in PHP. I am a Software Architect at Plusnet a Sheffield-based ISP, now part of the BT Group.
During my 6+ years journey with Plusnet, I have helped set up the continuous integration environment as part of a long-term drive towards Test-Driven Development.
I am currently working on tools to support automated software deployment and continuous integration platform. In my free time I occasionally contribute to opensource software like PHPUnit, phpUnderControl, Behat and Sonar and speak at conferences about all SQA things.
@proofek
Thijs is an evangelist at Combell, the top Belgian hoster. As an evangelist he supports communities and has a particular love for the PHP community.
Thijs is also boardmember of the PHPBenelux user group and organized thePHPBenelux Conference earlier this year.
| Track 1 | Track 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| 08:00 – 08:45 | Arrival & Registration |
|
| 08:45 – 09:00 | Opening Remarks - Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas |
|
| 09:00 – 09:40 | Keynote: F is for Failure – Josh Holmes |
|
| 09:50 - 10:50 | Estimation, or "How To Dig Your Own Grave" – Rowan Merewood |
OpenStreetMap For The Web – Derick Rethans |
| 11:00 - 12:00 | Essential Node.js For Web Developers – Mike Amundsen |
Ten Commandments Of A Software Engineer – Sebastian Marek |
| 12:00 - 13:30 | Lunch |
|
| 13:30 - 14:30 | Visualising Data – Brian Suda |
The Emperor's New Clothes – Kevinjohn Gallagher |
| 14:40 - 15:40 | Lessons Learned From Testing Legacy Code – John Mertic |
Mashing Up JavaScript – Bastian Hofmann |
| 15:50 - 16:50 | Is Your App Ready For The (Hybrid) Cloud – Thijs Feryn |
Alice & Bob: Public Key Cryptography 101 – Joshua Thijssen |
| 17:00 – 17:40 | Keynote: How The Web Evolves With Hypermedia – David Zülke |
|
| 17:40 – 18:00 | Closing Remarks - Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas |
|
The Hackathon will be hosted at Dynamic Earth and it is the day you get to organise. Come hack on a project with others, run a workshop or have a group discussion, it's all your choice. There is going to be plenty to get involved in from speakers workshops to OpenStreetMap hacking and RoboCode tournaments.
| 09:30 – 10:00 | Arrival with Tea/Coffee and Pastries |
|---|---|
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Share your Ideas: Everyone will get the chance to talk about what they want to work on and invite others to join them |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | Form Groups: Once everyone has seen the projects, get involved in what most interests you |
| 10:30 – 13:00 | Get to the hacking and workshops |
| 13:00 – 13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30 – 16:30 | More time for hacking and workshops |
| 16:30 – 17:00 | Show off time: For those who hacked on a project, now is the time to show off what you worked on for the day |
... so we'd like to extend a massive thank you to those who have already generously offered Whisky Web sponsorship. Their contributions help us keep the costs down and offer a top-notch lineup of speakers at the most competitive ticket prices you're likely to see.
In addition to the benefits detailed in our sponsorship pack brochure, sponsors get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that they're contributing to our efforts, and those of the wider web community, in making the web a better place.
If you too would like to become a sponsor, check out the sponsorship packages and email us at [email protected] or call Joe at +44 (0)7818 496 282.
The Hub is situated adjacent to Edinburgh Castle in the very heart of Edinburgh's historic Old Town. It is less than half a mile from Waverley train station and 7 miles from Edinburgh International Airport.
Paid on street and disabled parking is available on johnson Terrace and there is an NCP car park located on Castle Terrace which is a short walk from The Hub
This conference is being organised by a small group of passionate developers from the Edinburgh web community. Managing this event is Juozas "Joe" Kaziukėnas, CEO of local besoke software development company Web Species.
This is a massive undertaking, so to help Joe get this off the ground he has enlisted the help of Michael, Dale, Paul and Max to assist with everything from creating this site, developing a CfP application and researching and sourcing suppliers and resources.
