Tags: 2013

All the videos from last year’s dConstruct have been posted on Vimeo (with a backup on the Internet Archive). If you were there, you can re-live the fun all over again. And if you weren’t there, you can see just what you missed:

1. Amber Case
2. Luke Wroblewski
3. Nicole Sullivan
4. Simone Rebaudengo
5. Sarah Angliss
6. Keren Elazari
7. Maciej Cegłowski
8. Dan Williams
9. Adam Buxton

Don’t forget the audio is also available for your listening pleasure. Slap the RSS feed into the podcasting application of your choosing.

Revisiting the brilliance of last year’s dConstruct should get you in the mood for this year’s event. Put the date in your calendar: Friday, September 5th. Last year was all about Communicating With Machines. This year will be all about Living With The Network.

More details will be unveiled soon (he said, hoping to cultivate a feeling of mystery and invoke a sense of anticipation).

At the start of 2013, I wrote:

Let’s see what this year brings.

Well, it brought much the same as the year before. Here’s what I wrote about 2012:

Nothing particularly earth-shattering happened, and that’s just fine with me. I made some websites. I did some travelling. It was grand.

That’s also true of 2013.

The travelling was particularly nice. Work—specifically conference speaking—brought me to some beautiful locations: Porto, Dubrovnik, and Nürnberg to name just three. And not all of my travelling was work-related. Jessica and I went to the wonderful San Sebastián to celebrate her fortieth birthday. “I’ll take to you to any restaurant in the world for your birthday”, I said. She chose Etxebarri. Good choice.

Conference-speaking took me back to some old favourites too: Freiburg, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Amsterdam. I’m very lucky (and privileged) to have the opportunity to travel to interesting places, meet my peers, and get up on a stage to geek out to a captive audience. I enjoy the public speaking anyway, but it’s always an extra bonus when it takes me to a nice location. In fact, between you and me, that’s often the biggest criterion for me when it comes to speaking at an event …so if you want me to speak at an event you’re organising in some exotic location, give me a shout.

Mind you, two of my event highlights in 2013 didn’t involve any travelling at all: Responsive Day Out at the start of March, and dConstruct at the start of September, both of them right here in Brighton. I’m really, really pleased with how both of those events turned out. Everyone had a splendid time. I’m already starting to plan the next dConstruct: put Friday, September 5th 2014 in your calendar now. And who knows? …maybe there’ll even be a reprise of the Responsive Day Out in 2014.

Other highlights of the year include travelling to CERN for the line-mode browser dev days, and the inspiring Science Hack Day in San Francisco.

It was a big year for Clearleft. We moved into our lovely new building and hired quite a few new lovely people. So much change in such a short period of time was quite nerve-wracking, to be honest, but it’s all turning out just fine (touch wood).

Last year, I wrote:

I’m going to continue hacking away on Huffduffer and The Session whenever I can in 2013. I find those personal projects immensely rewarding.

Both projects continue to be immensely rewarding, although I probably neglected Huffduffer a bit; I definitely spent more time working on The Session. In 2014 I should really devote more time to adactio.com, because I also said:

I’m also hoping to have time to do some more writing.

I suppose I did a fair amount of wordsmithing here in my journal but perhaps in 2014 I might get my teeth stuck into something more bookish again. We’ll see.

So, all in all, a perfectly fine year for me personally and professionally. Like I said, it was grand.

Looking beyond my own personal sphere, 2013 was far from grand. The worst fears of even the most paranoid conspiracy theorist turned out to be nothing compared to what we found out about GCHQ and the NSA. It would be very easy to become despondent and fatalistic about the dystopian cyberpunk reality that we found ourselves living in.

Or we can look on the bright side, like Bruce Schneier, Glenn Greenwald, and Aral are doing. Schneier points out that the crypto works (it was routed around), Greenwald points to the Pinkerian positive overall trend in human history, and Aral reminds us that we have the power to build the kind of technologies we want to see in the world.

Whatever your reaction—despair, hope, or everything in between—we all owe Edward Snowden an enormous debt for his actions. I’m not sure that I would have had his courage were I in his situation. The year—perhaps the decade—belongs to Edward Snowden.

Those lovely people at the jam factory have reprised their Jam Odyssey for 2013—this time it’s an underwater dive …through jam.

Looking back through my jams, I thought that they made for nice little snapshots of the year.

1. February 3rd: Meat Abstract by Therapy? …because apparently I had a dream about Therapy?
2. February 9th: Jubilee Street by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds …because I had just been to the gig/rehearsal that Jessica earned us tickets to. That evening was definitely a musical highlight of the year.
3. February 20th: Atlanta Lie Low by Robert Forster …because I was in Atlanta for An Event Apart.
4. March 25th: Larsen B by British Sea Power …because I had just seen them play a gig (on their Brighton home turf) and this was the song they left us with.
5. April 8th: Tramp The Dirt Down by Elvis Costello …because it was either this or Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead! (or maybe Margaret In A Guillotine). I had previously “jammed” it in August 2012, saying “Elvis Costello (Davy Spillane, Donal Lunny, and Steve Wickham) in 1989. Still waiting.”
6. May 7th: It’s A Shame About Ray by The Lemonheads …because Ray Harryhausen died.
7. July 5th: Summertime In England by Van Morrison …because it was a glorious Summer’s day and this was playing on the stereo in the coffee shop I popped into for my morning flat white.
8. August 13th: Spaceteam by 100 Robots …because Jim borrowed my space helmet for the video.
9. September 22nd: Higgs Boson Blues by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds …because this was stuck in my head the whole time I was at hacking at CERN (most definitely a highlight of 2013).
10. October 7th: Hey, Manhattan by Prefab Sprout …because I was in New York.
11. October 15th: Pulsar by Vangelis …because I was writing about Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
12. October 27th: Romeo Had Juliette by Lou Reed …because Lou Reed died, and also: this song is pure poetry.

I like This Is My Jam. On the one hand, it’s a low-maintenance little snippet of what’s happening right now. On the other hand, it makes for a lovely collage over time.

Or, as Matt put it back in 2010:

We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake.

Without deliberate planning, we have created amazing new tools for remembering. The real-time web might just be the most elaborate and widely-adopted architecture for self-archival ever created.

If you didn’t make it to this year’s dConstruct, at least your ears can catch up. If you did make it to this year’s dConstruct, your ears can experience the fun all over again.

The audio is available, is what I’m saying here.

1. Amber Case: Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface
2. Luke Wroblewski: Infinite Inputs
3. Nicole Sullivan: Don’t Feed the Trolls
4. Simone Rebaudengo: Great; things are connected, but what will they actually talk about?
5. Sarah Angliss: Tech and the Uncanny
6. Keren Elazari: The Heroes and Anti-heroes of the Information Age
7. Maciej Cegłowski: Fan is a Tool-Using Animal
8. Dan Williams: Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area
9. Adam Buxton: Is My Laptop Ruining My Life?

The audio is on Huffduffer for your listening pleasure. If you’d like to take it with you on the go, here’s the RSS feed—just pop that into your podcasting/catching software of choice.

While you’re at it, this might be a nice opportunity to go back and explore the dConstruct archive where you can find every talk from every dConstruct from 2005 to 2013. That’s 70 talks, or about 46 hours of listening pleasure.

Share and enjoy!

If you were at dConstruct last week (lucky you!), you will have heard this music during the breaks. All of these tracks are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

• Novia En Venus by The Satellite
• Melting Sky by Kaminishi
• Safe and Sound (Loon Calls) by Daughters and Orchids
• Fabula by Ghost Orchid
• …I No Longer Know What I Say by ANOA
• A-5 by Elipsys
• Sorrow by Salter Cane

Yes, that last one is from my band—a little bit of audio nepotism.