For two days in April a large group of designers, developers, business people and creative thinkers gathered to share ideas at DIBI, the North East’s “Design It, Build It” conference. With two tracks, one about design for the web and the other about coding, a couple of hundred people got together for workshops, lectures and talks on just about every aspect of building internet technology. Usable were fortunate enough to be in attendance.

Day #1 of DIBI focused on workshops delivered by tech experts in a variety of fields. We attended a FuelPHP session with Phil Sturgeon (contributor to the FuelPHP framework, Code Ignitor, and part of Bloo.ie‘s core team) and a session on Node.js with Tom Hughes-Croucher, one of the core Node.js developers. Both sessions were fascinating and useful. Phil’s FuelPHP introduction took PHP coders with from no experience of the framework to a working “Instagram” clone with Twitter OAuth login, image uploading and some creative image effects. The power of the Fuel framework was obvious, and Phil did a tremendous job (despite the IT infrastructure doing it’s best to thwart him). The Node.js workshop was equally good with a brilliant intro to the language that reminded us of some of Node’s core features. All in all, the workshops were very worthwhile.

The following day the conference talks kicked off with an entertaining and engaging keynote by creative Javascript developer Seb Lee-Delisle. Seb’s talk was on the possibilities of bring together art and code. It’s the first time we’ve seen live coding in Commodore 64 BASIC on stage. Needlesstosay, we loved it. From the roots of generative art Seb went on explain why designers should learn to code, and demonstrated how easy it can be by coding a particle system using Javascript (all live of course). It was great fun. You can see what Seb created here.

As the conference is split in to two tracks Alex and I decided the best approach for Usable was to divide and conquer, with Alex following the dev track while I followed the design side. The design talks were fascinating. Paul Annett and Tim Paul from gov.uk started by introducing the design principles that they have been devising for the new government website that’s replacing direct.gov.uk and Business Link. They outlined the thought processes they used, how they’re implementing them, and they managed to use the word “agiley” which was fun. Their list of principles is available online. Following on from that we heard Susan Weinschenk on the subject of what designers need to know about the way people think. Susan’s “Neuro Web Design” book has been a go-to reference on my bookshelf for a while, so hearing her speak was a treat. We took away some new things, such as the fact humans can’t really cope with more than 4 options when they’re making a decision. It was all very interesting.

On the development conference track Alex heard Tom Hughes-Croucher give an introduction to Node.js, explaining the principles behind the language and what made it excel for web platform development. The main virtues of scalability, rock-solid stability and being able to leverage all the benefits of Javascript development that we’ve learnt from front-end development made us certain that we’ve picked the right technology for Usable.

After a short break for lunch (which was delicious) we headed in to talks about HTML5+JS and the dangers of “shiny” versus “inclusive” design. Rob Hawkes delivered a great summary of HTML5 technology and how it can apply to much more than just developing online games, from simple things like being able to lock the orientation of a browser on a mobile platform to using WebGL to accelerate 2D performance of web apps. Some of the tech will no doubt find it’s way in to our Requirements application in due course. Chris Mills and Bruce Lawson from Opera gave an equally engaging performance dressed as an angel and a devil (seriously) to extol the virtues of best practises writing web sites. From fundamental things like accessibility and usability to simple additions like using the correct form for vendor specific CSS tags were covered.

Paul Boag, a web designer with almost 2 decades of experience, then spoke on “Client Centric Web Design”. Paul is clearly very passionate about giving the most he can to his clients, and delivering the most he can in the websites that he builds. He rallied against the prevailing notion that clients are the worst part of design, and gave a great talk outlining how to build a relationship with a client that goes beyond a business transaction to work together on making something amazing. The ideas that he described resonated with us, and seem to be something that Requirements might actually aid web designers and developers achieve.

Ted Roden gave a talk on the going solo, and how you can quit your day job to launch your own company on your own without needing investors. A large part of the appeal of the conference as a whole was hearing and learning from the personal stories of the people speaking, and seeing how their experience and ours’ aligned.

The two final talks that we heard were from Dan Rubin about how we should push ourselves harder and strive to do better things, and the closing keynote from Cameron Moll about the mathematics of creativity and how we really build on the work of others to create original things. Both talks were motivating and exciting, and left us raring to get back to the office to work on building our first product.

Before we could though, there was the matter of the closing party. It was a lot of fun, especially meeting loads of people new and old. I’m sure we managed to catch up with practically everyone in the North East tech scene, and we met stacks of amazing new folk too. Coupled with beer, pizza and an impromptu trip to the new Newcastle branch of Brewdog it was pretty damn awesome.

All in all DIBI was absolutely fantastic fun, very entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring. A huge thanks go to Oli Wood and Elspeth Lawson for their hard work organising everything, to all the workshop people and speakers, to the sponsors and to everyone we met that made the two days so much fun. We’ll see you again next year.