I just came back from giving my first talk in Taiwan and I have to say it seemed to have worked out well. The room was packed and people asked very good questions afterwards.

[slideshare id=1297512&doc=1297512]

• Download the slides The road to professional web development – PDF 11MB

In the slides I covered the history of web development, what we did wrong and what we should avoid in the future. I also covered the YUI and how it embodies some of the priniciples great web development is based on.

Update: Liang-Bin Hsueh posted an audio recording of the talk missing only the first five minutes.

I’ve just finished watching Nate Koechley’s talk on professional Front-End Engineering on the YDN Theater:

You can download the m4v for your ipod and read the transcription on Eric Miraglia’s blog.

I’ve seen Nate give this talk before in a shorter version at @media in London, but this version has the whole story from what frontend engineering is, over technologies and methodologies to use and avoid up to a very compelling argument why it all matters.

So if you can spare an hour and a half (or chunk it over two workout sessions in the gym like I did) go and watch this video before you start flaming on mailing lists, forums or flat out tell people that it doesn’t matter when something is incomprehensible or works by magic – as long as it works.

Thanks Nate for a great encapsulation of the whole frontend matter in one video.