How do we become better interface developers? How do we find better problems to solve?

The most interesting work lies outside of your comfort zone. So how can you get there? This is a sort of crash course in stepping out of your comfort zone, trying new things, learning to learn and creating your own luck.

How should we do research & development? To be innovative, we must create a culture that tolerates failure. But who wants to fail? And certainly not admit to it. I want to share with you some of my failures. We're taught to do things the right way. But to discover something that other people haven't, one needs to do things the wrong way.

What is an etag, exactly? What's all that stuff in the Accept header? And what the heck does a Vary header do anyways?! Web developers use HTTP everyday but most of us don't know how to get the most out of it. This talk goes past memorizing status codes (although we'll see those too) and teaches how to get the most out of every request and response.

Devices like the Chromebook Pixel (which are hi-DPI, touch-sensitive but aren't phones or tablets) show us that the future of the web is too complex for a simplistic approach to responsiveness. It's not enough to think that media queries and a few screen width breakpoints suffice to make your site future-friendly.

In this talk I'm going to propose that responsiveness requires us to take into account the entire context of the user. That means everything from device orientation to bandwidth to identity.

Several exciting new Web standards in the areas of magazine-style layouts and advanced graphical and special effects are working their way through the W3C . Implementations of these advanced features are already starting to show up in various mobile and desktop browsers. We'll discuss the state of these technologies, and show you how and where you can use them right now and what to expect in the near future.

Nothing stands still in this industry: new language features in your weapon of choice, nginx gaining ground on Apache, yet another standard you should be adhering to, cloud hosting services making deployment as easy as "git push"... the list goes on. What can you do to make sure that you're keeping up with all these changes without cloning yourself and only sleeping 3 hours a week?

It's not just about improving your coding skill, it's understanding how to make all your abilities and those of your peers work together to keep you ahead of the game. We'll look at a combination of human hacks and hard work to help fine tune the most important machine you own.

Do you need to process thousands of images in the background for your web app? Do you need to share data across multiple applications, probably written in different languages and sitting at different servers? Your real time data feed is becoming slow because you are polling the database constantly for new data updates? Do you need to scale information processing during peek times? What about deploying new features with zero downtime? If any of these problems sound familiar then you probably need to use messaging in your application.

In this talk I will introduce RabbitMQ, a messaging and queue server that can help us tackle those problems. We will learn how to implement messaging into our applications, use Pub/Sub, RPC and give a new meaning to the term 'decoupling'.

Learn about the vision behind Firefox OS, and the open web technologies available for building HTML5 apps, including WebAPIs. Check out our Boilerplate app and other tools designed to get you started developing HTML5 apps for Firefox OS and the web.