I got my first computer when I was 4 years old which, for those of you who know me, probably explains a lot. It was an Acorn Electron, it had 32KB of RAM, it cost my parents a fortune and, until 1993, it was my only real piece of computing kit. Sure, I had an Atari 2600, but with my Electron, I could play games that I'd bought, type out page after page of code from "Electron User" to run games featured in the magazine's pages – because my parents couldn't get the version with the tape on the front – and, ultimately, learn BASIC and create my own software.

My parents' gift and foresight – in seeing the value of buying a computer for me at such an early age – were probably the most valuable things I would be given at such an early age, despite not knowing it until long after I'd left school. Aside from hours spent playing Repton, Elite and the myriad of other fantastic Superior Software games, the Electron gave me a grounding in programming, something which has been a huge contribution to who I am and what I do today.

The Computer Room

By the time I was 10, we'd moved from the centre of Birmingham to the suburb of Great Barr on the very edges of the city, and in September 1990, I started secondary school at Stuart Bathurst R.C. High School. My earlier tour of the four-storey building that formed part of my new school in Wednesbury, hadn't included a visit to the room in the corner of the top floor which housed the Maths department, but my first lesson in that room changed everything.

At my primary school – St. Catherine's in Birmingham, if you must know – we had a single RM machine. I can't remember much about it, apart from the fact that it was very basic and didn't sound anything like my computer sounded when it was loading programs from the cassette tapes. But this amazing computer room was packed full of computers – a few Archimedes machines, but mostly BBC Micros hooked up to monitors of varying capabilities.

Slightly more amazing than the lab full of computing equipment, however, was the teacher who inhabited it.

The Nun

During the 80s, I'd grown up with the vision of bespectacled old men with beards who taught computing – if you're around my age, and you had any interest in computing around that time, you might remember The Computer Programme which was commissioned by the BBC. The story is much longer and complicated but, as basically as possible, Acorn Computers and the BBC had designed the BBC Micro to be an essential part of british education, and it certainly fellt like Stuart Bathurst had embraced that vision with gusto.

Except that whilst sometimes seen wearing glasses, our teacher didn't have a beard and wasn't a man, but was an intensely intimidating nun, who went by the name of Sister Celsus. Those that messed with her soon learned not to, and it wasn't long until everyone was given a basic understanding of computing and the BBC BASIC langauge.

The small handful of us who had already been exposed to BBC BASIC and knew our way around the computers were quickly identified and nurtured, motivated into spending more time with the computers and often pushed, in class, to deliver advanced work. In the first two years at the school, we were given access to the computer room at lunchtimes and some were even given access to help out with more technical projects, taught about databases and more interesting uses of the machines.

Long before computing became part of any syllabus, Sister Celsus was teaching kids how to program, how to properly interact with computers – not simply how to use Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and choose Comic Sans as your font.

Whatever happened to Computing in schools?

At the start of my second year, the BBC Micros had all but been replaced by Archimedes machines, and by the start of my third, RM-branded, watered-down PCs – no doubt cheaper than their Acorn counterparts – had started to make their way into the computing lab, and many classrooms around the school. Computing became less of a subject about programming and more about how to use computers for everyday needs, for writing letters, creating presentations and basically learning how to get around Windows.

When the time came to move into my third year, Sister Celsus had left the school, and the real passionate forces behind computing at Bathurst began to disappear. More and more Windows PCs, complete with ClarisWorks and very early versions of Microsoft Office, became commonplace throughout the school. Of course, a handful of students used to spend as much time on the remaining BBC and Acorn machines, mucking around and playing games like Elite and Exile until as late as 1993 on machines which had been distributed throughout the school.

It was around that time that my Electron moved to it's final resting place in my parent's loft, shortly after they'd bought me a Commodore Amiga. I'm sure both computers are still up there, and I imagine they both still work, though, if I remember correctly, one of the Electron's loose chips might need a bit of a jiggle in order to get it running again – something those who teach computing could probably do with. I got further involved in BASIC programming through AMOS Professional on my Amiga, but the early lessons in how to program stuck with me.

Much of everything I've heard about ICT classes in schools recently makes me cringe. Horror stories of students being taught that the style of a presentation is more important than the content, and – particularly abhorrent to me – students being taught how to create websites using PowerPoint. Friends of mine who actually failed their ICT course because they created a website using commercially acceptable methods instead of using Microsoft Office to do so. Perhaps it's just my interest in the field that clouds my memories, but I remember my computing classes being nothing like that – while we did learn how to use word processors and other applications, we were always encouraged to find new uses for the technology we were using.

Yes, there have been whispers of suggestions from Whitehall that the teaching of programming will be making a comeback to our schools, but it's the likes of Anna Debenham, who I'm sure will be the subject of many future ALD-themed blog posts, who are the real pioneers here. Becoming involved in schemes where us developers actually go out into schools and ask to be part of unconventional ICT lessons is a great way to help in this area – it's just a shame that teaching students something that doesn't involve office productivity software is labelled as unconventional.

Perhaps what should be thought of as unconventional is actually teaching kids – the potential developers of tomorrow – how to learn, and how to keep up with the rapidly changing standards and moving targets of modern web development.

Being thankful

Having a teacher like Sister Celsus bolstered the investment my parents had made, and whilst no-one stepped into the void left by her with the same level of interest, the time she dedicated to the subject galvanised my interest in the subject. I'd probably still be doing something with regards to computers right now, but I doubt I'd be as interested as I am had it not been for her.

Perhaps it's down to the fact that computing has become so ubiquitous, so big a part in everyday life, that the teaching of the subject has become so watered down, but I hope there are still teachers out there who recognise pupils with a knack for computing and who give them the same level of encouragement that I received from that amazing little Irish nun.

This entry is my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day 2011. You may also be interested in The Nun and the Archimedes – my buddy Matt Patterson's ALD post from 2009.

If you're on Facebook, you've probably seen this update from some of your friends:

Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same for the NSPCC. Until Monday (December 6th) there should be no human faces on Facebook but an invasion of memories. This is [a] campaign to stop violence against children.

I started seeing this pop up in my news feed from a bunch of my friends on Saturday. Many of my friends started changing their photos without posting the update.

I didn't.

Some of my friends were outraged by my comment. A few realised what I was getting at.

Show your apathy with a Twibbon or Profile Badge today!

People are outraged by many things - child abuse, threats of funding cuts to services, huge losses of jobs, investment banking, politics - but very few people are actually moved to the point where they get off their arses and do something about it.

Some people will even change the entire colour scheme of their websites for a day, or even a month. I would wager that the majority of individuals who make these kinds of changes won't give a second thought to the actual cause, nor will they donate their time, skills or money to anything that might, y'know, actually help.

What did you do? You changed a few pixels of your profile photo.

Well done.

Whilst I'm no conference speaker, I've had the privilege of being invited to stand up in front of a group of my peers and talk about what I do on a few occasions. You won't need to view all 25 minutes of my session at The Multipack Presents to realise that, when it comes to delivering a talk, I'm firmly placed within the amateur group:

However, whilst I'm more of an attendee than a speaker, I'm also a relative newbie when it comes to conference attendance. My first, in October 2007, was in London at the Future of Web Apps Expo. Even as a lone delegate, I managed to become acquainted with a few other delegates who made the three days a little more interesting.

Choosing a conference

As a newbie, and even as a seasoned conference attendee, my thoughts are that the decision to attend a conference will be based on a few things:

• How much?
• What is the conference's primary theme or subject?
• Is it a multi-track conference?
• Who is speaking, and what are their talks about?

If the conference demonstrates value, I'll often approach my boss, but even before I'll think about doing that, I'll be asking myself whether I think the conference is affordable and offers good value for money, or whether it's just paying for a few people to come a long way.

Secondly, and most importantly, it's subject and theme. More and more conferences are moving away from the typical designer/developer divide and focusing on a theme or a subject. Instead of being developer-focused, for instance, a conference may lean towards development, but include a few talks on design that would be of benefit to the developers attending - and vice-versa, of course.

As for multiple track conferences, I'm not sure I'll visit another. FOWA London 2007 and 2008 were good, but the complexity of having a one-for-all type conference diluted the effectiveness. There were talks I wanted to see that overlapped which meant I missed some. Perhaps I'm lazy and don't want to move around too much, but a focussed event, with a single track, catering to a theme instead of splitting the audience needlessly, seems like a more successful idea to me.

Finally, which speakers will be there, and what are the subjects of their talks.

Who are you and what are you talking about?

I'm going to be really clear here. I cannot fucking stand it when I am sat in the audience, looking forward to a topic - based on the title, and what little blurb we're given - only to be let down by the speaker, who is only on stage to sell their product, doesn't really give a shit about the topic, and is talking to the wrong audience. On more than one occasion at the Future of Web Apps conferences, I simply got up and walked out of the hall, disgusted at this tactic.

Instead of entitling your talk "Special Announcement" when it's a sales message, or "Cloud Computing in the Enterprise" when it has nothing to do with cloud computing, but is more about using your SAAS offering instead of Microsoft Outlook, do the honourable thing - tell us it's a sales presentation.

Conference organisers should be ashamed of this too. Knowing, full well, that your sponsor is going to try to pull this tactic and doing nothing about it smacks of a lack of integrity. The right thing to do would be to approach your sponsor and suggest a different title of the topic. If it's a sponsorship message, let your audience know.

Lastly, the most important thing to do is to make me, as an audience member, interested. I go to conferences for two reasons - knowledge and networking. If you're up on stage and you're not being clearly labelled as a sponsor who is giving a sponsorship message, I'd really like it if I came away from your session having learned something new, or shown a new way of looking at something. 

Giving to your audience without asking in return

Of the three big conferences I've been to, the person who stands out the most for me in terms of giving knowledge to the audience without asking for anything in return, was Matt Biddulph. As CTO of Dopplr - before he became software designer and creative technologist for Nokia after they bought Dopplr in 2009 - I was witness to two fine talks in two consecutive years.

On both occasions, Matt's talks were completely different. In 2007, he spoke about getting the best out of third-party widgets on your site, and helping other sites when you offer widgets. In 2008, his talk was about messaging, about modern successful applications being a collection of small parts, loosely coupled, and about using n-tier mentality when designing apps, even when you're using a single server.

In both talks, he showed insight, delivered tips on good development practices, but most importantly he gave. Sure, he mentioned he was from Dopplr, and he explained what Dopplr was, but at no point during any of his talks did he try and sell you anything. More importantly, his 2008 talk was completely different to the one he'd given in 2007.

The problem of being a conference regular

To someone attending their first conference, everything is new - the experience, the speakers and the talks themselves. 

If you go to a lot of conferences, particularly in the same area and in the same few months, there's a good chance you'll see some familiar faces on stage. There's good reason for that - the ones that appear at multiple conferences are there because they have something to give: knowledge, a good message and passion about their topic.

The more conferences you go to, and the more thinly-veiled sales presentations you're coerced into sitting through, the more cynical you become. I took a year out of attending conferences last year. My reasons were mostly due to having constrained budgets, a trip to Australia and New Zealand, a wedding and a honeymoon, but for the conferences I could have attended, there was no reason for me to go back. In the majority of cases, I saw a worrying trend of similar subjects, similar talk titles, and a lot of the same people.

Let me be clear, however: I would happily sit in an audience and listen to Relly Annett-Baker talk about copywriting; Matt Biddulph about anything related to application architecture; Stuart Langridge, Remy Sharp or John Resig about anything related to JavaScript; Bruce Lawson about emerging web standards; and - in fact - anyone talk passionately about a subject that excites and intrigues them.

After all, isn't that one of the reasons you go to conferences?

Less of the same, please

In 2008 at FOWA, I saw Francisco Tolmasky demonstrate the Cappuccino framework and his company's 280 Slides application, built the aforementioned framework and "Objective-J". 280 Slides is, at it's core, a clone of Apple Keynote that works within a browser that will support it. I also recall Ryan Carson coming onto the stage shortly afterwards, proclaiming that 280 Slides was really the future of web apps. 

I remember how Microsoft tried to get the Visual Basic community building web apps using ASP.NET in the early days - drag and drop components, absolutely positioned onto an HTML document - and Objective-J and Cappuccino seem, to me, to be very similar to that approach. Tolmasky spoke with passion and knowledge about his product, but I didn't take much away from his presentations at FOWA because Atlas, Cappuccino and Objective-J strike me as technologies that just aren't relevant to me as a web developer.

His talk at FOWA 2009, which I didn't attend, was based around Atlas, his company's web-based development environment for Cappuccino apps. This year, he's back at FOWA, with another talk on how to write 'stunning' apps with less code. Sound familiar?

Please don't misunderstand me here - I'm fully aware that, as an invited speaker or expert in a particular topic, you're going to talk about the same subject. As I said above, I'll happily listen to a person talk about a subject that ignites them for hours on end, again and again, but delivering the same talk - or a talk which is only slightly different to your last one - at different conferences is, as far as I'm concerned, lazy. Sure, you may be talking to a different audience this year than last, but you've got to plan for some overlap between new and old attendees.

As someone paying to attend a conference, I expect - with reason, I hope you'll agree - that the talks I'm listening to will be informative, entertaining and, above all, original.

Honing your craft

The one exception to this rule, in my opinion, is where talks are given at grassroots and free conferences. If the speaker isn't being paid to attend, or is giving their time up for free, or if the event itself is organised by a grassroots organisation such as The Multipack, then a degree of repetition can be acceptable, giving the speaker a a chance to test out a new talk with a smaller, willing bunch of enthusiasts, some of who may be able to give constructive feedback.

Photo Credit: Andy Higgs

I'm grateful to have had the chance to hear Drew McLellan, Jon Hicks, Stuart Langridge, Bruce Lawson, Remy Sharp and Simon Collison (pictured above) talk about their subjects, all for free, thanks to the Multipack Presents and Geek in the Park events that I've been involved in, and I think more events like this will help up-and-coming speakers talk about what matters to them.

Giving people the opportunity to talk is what will make for greater conferences in the future, with fresh ideas from fresh people. I'd love to see an event whereby groups of established speakers team up with relative newbies - one pair per subject - to present a talk and chair a relaxed, discussion, very similar to some of the Multipack Presents events that have been held in the past, but with an opportunity to promote more speaking.

Don't judge a conference by it's speakers

But importantly, the quality of a conference can't be calculated solely on the speakers that are attending. I did some research on people who have spoken at some of the more established conferences since 2006 - dConstruct, Future of Web Apps, @media. When I looked at the line-ups for the upcoming conferences that I have the option of attending in the next six months, I checked to see who I've seen before or who I've no interest in seeing again.

When I used this method against FOWA London 2010, dConstruct 2010 and New Adventures in Web Design 2011, the results were as follows (where SB/NI means Seen Before or Not Interested):

The raw speaker data is available as a Google Spreadsheet, which you're more than welcome to append to as time goes by. I simply looked at the speakers that I've seen before and the talks that I would not be interested in and tallied them together.

Of course, if I used this method alone, I'd be suggesting that seeing Matt Biddulph a second time would be a bad idea, but speakers such as Biddulph show that a good speaker will tailor new talks to his audience. God knows that there are conferences out there who bring out the 'big' names, like Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuck and Mike Arrington, but I'm not sure I'm bothered about hearing from that kind of internet celebrity anymore.

I've never attended a barcamp or an unconference, despite the fact that I'd very much like to be involved in one. I feel that the interaction between speaker and audience is one of the most important parts of learning, and a smaller number of speakers, with short, sharp presentations would allow for more interaction, and a better chance of taking something valuable away.

Simon Collison, who spoke at Geek in the Park last year, has created something a little different - the New Adventures conference, starting with New Adventures in Web Design in January 2011, and it looks like it could be exactly what I'm hankering for:

New Adventures... will be carefully curated; chock-full of integrity, opinion, and fresh content, with an emphasis on shaking things up and challenging convention. This event has inspiration, thinking, and intelligence at its core. It will encourage debate, enthuse, excite, ask questions, and look for real outcomes.

Simon Collison — New Adventures in Web Design

I'm sure that Colly will pull it off. His intention of working closely with the speakers and ensure that they're sticking to the principles of the conference will pay dividends, and given the price and location, I expect it will be a very popular event.

The proof of the pudding

I'm sincerely looking forward to both dConstruct and New Adventures in Web Design for different reasons. dConstruct has always attracted me but, until this year, I've never been able to attend. The type of talks and the fact that the talks are very much cross-discipline means I'm hoping to come away inspired in many different areas of my craft.

New Adventures excites me because it could turn the idea of the conference on its head - the format and the whole idea that the event will be curated makes me think it will address the problems with many of the conferences that I've outlined above. I really do wish Simon well with the event and look forward to being in Nottingham in January.

However, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, my attendance of multi-track super-conferences - like FOWA, @media and the like - has come to an end. Smaller events, focussed on a single theme, as opposed to being all-encompassing developer- or designer-only events, are where I'll be spending my time in the future.

Along with grassroots events, I expect they're also where I'll be finding the most value.

I've been a big fan of Tweetie both on the Mac and on the iPhone, where it is now the official iPhone Twitter Client, for quite some time now. I paid for a license on the Mac, and I bought the premium version on the App Store for my phone.

Even at £1.79, I felt it was great value, and I'm sure many users agree with me. Now it's free, there's really no reason not to use it, especially so given that - since April 9th of this year - it's also the official client for the platform.

Sadly, that's probably why my satisfaction with the desktop version is beginning to wane.

Goodbye atebits, hello Twitter Inc.

Loren Brichter, the man behind atebits and Tweetie, is now part of Twitter's mobile team. Who can blame him? To all of those who dislike Loren for 'selling out': you'd have done exactly the same thing in his situation. That's the dream situation for any indie developer - to be snapped up.

Right now, his priorities have doubtless changed. We're told an iPad app is in the works, and despite many voices to the contrary, Loren insists that Tweetie 2.0 is coming for the Mac, even going so far as to say that he'll continue working on the app up to version 3.0.

However, I'm guessing that Twitter's management have made it quite clear that, as an employee, his top priorities are now Twitter for iPhone and iPad. Despite reports that Twitter employees love Tweetie for Mac, I imagine that the priorities for Tweetie for Mac are lower than his other projects.

Plenty of people believe that Tweetie has turned into vapourware and that, now he's part of Twitter Inc., it's increasingly unlikely that he'll release a newer version anytime soon.

For the record, I count myself among the optimists.

From optimism to frustration

The Twitter API continues to go from strength to strength. The retweet feature alone is one of my favourites. Some of the people I follow have a lot of interesting things to say - after all, why else would I follow them. Sadly, some of them suffer from bouts of retweetarrhea. Originally, this would mean a screenful of RT this and RT that - something that wasn't easily filtered.

These days, the official method of retweeting - which attributes the original content to the original author - is as simple as hitting the retweet button in supported clients, and seeing original tweets from their original authors in your timeline.

The only problem is that, right now, Tweetie's support of retweeting is limited to showing you the tweets in the old RT @user: fashion. Not great.

Lists is another great feature of Twitter - I can segregate a bunch of people who are not quite interesting enough to follow and put them into a list. All I need to then do is look at the list and view the tweets from those users. It's like TweetDeck's panes feature, but officially supported and very much a welcome addition.

As far as Tweetie's concerned though, lists don't exist. Neither does the ability to geo-tag your tweets. 

None of these features are easily accessible via the Tweetie desktop client, but for me, it's the absence of the correct implementation of Twitter's retweet API that I miss the most.

Still hopeful, but only just

Before Tweetie, I used Twitterrific from the IconFactory. I had a single Twitter account, and I kept up with a relatively small number of people - in the low tens. The application was simple to use, didn't get in the way, and did what I needed it to do. When I was on my Windows machine - back when I had a physical PC - I used to use TweetDeck, up until I noticed that whilst running it was taking up a sizeable chunk of my processing time.

I've been looking for a client to replace Tweetie for quite some time. The problem was exacerbated last week by various API changes and problems which resulted in both Tweetie and Twitterrific being unable to connect to the service or be of any real use:

To Tweetie's credit, even though there are many other clients out there, I haven't been able to get to grips with any of them. Despite it's flaws and lack of support for the newest features of the Twitter platform, I still consider it to be the best desktop client out there - but only just.

I understand Loren's choice to not give an indication of when Tweetie 2 is likely to arrive, but having some sort of dialogue with your users, letting them know what's being worked on, would be far better than leaving them in the dark.

Despite the fact that I find EchoFon just short of being a credible replacement, and Socialite being far too busy, if Tweetie 2 doesn't arrive soon, I can see myself learning to live with their differences and shortcomings and jumping ship to something new - especially if Twitter releases any more must-have features.