Events

Explain Yourself! Documentation for Better Code (Chris Ward) - How many times have you come across an awesome looking library or tool that you're keen to work with in your own project but can't even begin to understand how to use it?

Whilst open sourcing a language is nothing new, Apple's unprecedented step has caused massive excitement and activity for this new language, with a flurry of development and contributions.

Outside of my technical writing work for software projects I have been creating a board game. A board game also requires mechanics to function and players to clearly understand how these mechanics work to use and appreciate fully.

Games have been with us for centuries, from those that emulate battles like Chess and Risk, to the intricate mysteries of Go.

The battle between Google and Oracle may finally be over, but let's face it, the relationship between Android developers and Java is still a rocky one.

Electron is a fantastic tool for creating cross-platform apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that look and feel _relatively_ native to the hosted Platform. In this presentation I'll give a quick overview of what's possible.

An insight look on how to build a print-at-home Chip Shop (offline) board game with printed paper cards (72 products, 76 events and 36 personalities) that let you run a computer company in the 80's to build your silicon empire. Learn how to turn cards in markdown files as used on the game website into high-quality printable PDFs for a premium pre-boxed or print-yourself card deck version and much more.

In this presentation I'll be dragging LaTeX out of the past kicking and screaming and be showing that it's actually kinda cool.

We spend countless hours creating technically amazing projects built upon awesome, cutting edge code. We then promote our project through newsletters, events and social media and await certain success. But nothing happens. Why? Whoops, we forgot to tell anyone how to effectively use our project, all that time waisted. In this presentation I want to draw upon my experience in writing tutorials and technical documentation to help you write clear, concise and usable documentation for your own projects.

If you remember when web sites were all created with plain HTML pages, then you'll know that CMSs and dynamic web frameworks saved us and solved all our problems. Or did they? In fact, we instead spend a lot of time customising existing code to meet our requirements, grappling with deployments and then whacking caching on top of over-powered servers to get an ounce of speed.

Whilst open sourcing a language is nothing new, there is no denying the popularity of Apple's new language and this has solidified with their recent move.

We keep up to date with the latest developments in technologies and tools. We make sure to post pull requests to fix bugs we found in projects. We offer helpful advice in forums to people with coding questions. We propose talks for meetups and conferences to provide insight and inspiration.

I will be reading the intro from my 'One Day the World Ended' project at this cosy little bookshop.

How digital games are influencing board games and vice versa. I will discuss the numerous ways that board games are joining the digital era.

Programming a Board game? Why would you want to do that?