One of the biggest podcasts in the UK when it comes to web development and web design is Paul Boag’s Boagworld.com. Every week Paul talks about what’s hot and happening in the development world and mixes it with good humour and believable insights.

This week’s podcast is entitled “Hiring” but ends with an interview Paul did with me over Skype on Valentine’s. If you listen to it, you’ll hear that I did have a cold and it was a long day, and if you read the transcript, you’ll see that both Paul and me “um…” a lot.

Nevertheless Paul had some very good questions, and I hope I had interesting answers.

• Download the Podcast
• Check the podcast transcript on Boagworld

I just came back from a packed De Hem’s pub in Covent Garden where quite a bunch of people came around to celebrate the 2nd birthday of the YUI.

We had a video of the YUI team across the pond greeting us and I rallied the troops to tell the YUI people how they can be part of the excitement:

There’ll be a more detailed report soon on the YDN network, but now I am beat and it is bedtime :)

The lovely chaps from Northcast have edited and uploaded the video of my talk at GeekUp Leeds about JavaScript and the YUI.

I especially like that they went through the whole story, right from me arriving handing over the schwag and being hugged by mysterious flatcapped Northern beauties, including the whole talk and the full Q&A session. The second part of the Q&A session is a bit on the rough side from a sound perspective but I guess the free beer consumed till then is to blame.

I hope this is useful to some, it was interesting for me to see what I talked about as the whole presentation was finished on the train and completely ad-libbed as it is.

Thanks again to GeekUp and the NorthCast people, good job and I am looking forward to more of this sort.

Last Thursday I went to the Google offices in London Victoria to attend a bi-monthly unconference called Open Source Jam. I was running a bit on autopilot as I was in Leeds the day before talking about the YUI at the Geekup meeting and originally wanted to skip the session as I was pretty knackered. It was great though that I didn’t follow my instinct, but instead have a nice unconference with Pizza, Beer and lots of 5 minute+5 minute Q&A sessions revolving around creating interfaces for humans.

In comparison to other barcamps the Open Source Jam was a lot more technical and speakers were more coders than web developers. I’ve learnt about a chess program for the iPhone, how to write APIs to make them more accessible to humans, UXON - a User Interface Object Notation (more on this coming soon), Behaviour Driven Development, holes in the Flickr API and a lot of other things.

My initial idea of staying for an hour and then leaving for a speaker’s dinner of a company-internal conference was foiled and I took the last tube back from Victoria.

My own talk was a preview of a session I will give at the Abilitynet Accessibility conference in April, talking about how accessibility is not an extra task but – if taken into consideration from the beginning – an opportunity to build better products for everybody.

I want to thank the organizers and will very likely be there for the next jam.

Photo by Adewale Oshineye

Here is a talk I just gave at an internal SEO conference about the overlap of SEO and Accessibility. The main consensus is that if you look at it closely, the two are really trying to solve the same problem, most of the time our approach is what makes it tricky.