Opera's year in Dev Rel 2012

By Chris Mills

Summary

Everyone has been working and playing really hard in the web industry this year, and the Opera developer relations team is no exception! Our well travelled group of open standards raconteurs have walked the globe, educating, styling, scripting, code fixing, presenting, evangelising and generally making people smile. As a special Christmas treat, we would like to present a summary of highlights and fun times in 2012. Happy holidays from Opera dev rel!

Quick stats

97 new articles on Dev.Opera
46 blog posts on our Opera Developer News blog
62 articles for external publications, such as Smashing Magazine, .net Magazine, SitePoint and more
132 presentations given around the world, in Norway, France, the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, South-Africa, India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore
21,500 caffeinated beverages and 1,734 late nights
4.1 pints of beer (per day, per team member, on average)

Highlights

We got our hands dirty in lots of really interesting projects this year.

Andreas led our team with grace and determination, and published some great material on responsive design. He also organised Standards-Next: WebGL and HTML5-based games in Oslo, Norway.
Bruce wrote a fabulous series of articles for the Pastry Box project, globe trotted around the place waving the standards flag and dressed up as Satan, again. And since proposing the <picture> element last December as a way to solve the adaptive images problem, a whole W3C community group has grown up around it, leading to a specification guided by Marcos Cáceres and Mat Marquis. Whether or not it makes it into browsers, it's made everyone aware of the need.
Chris published his very own CSS3 book and joined the W3C as a W3C Fellow, devoting a lot of his time to launching and organising Webplatform.org. His band recorded their fourth album slated for release in early 2013, amidst rumours of his love of Coldplay.
Daniel used his gentlemanly charms to wow the fine folk of Japan, did a lot of work on extensions documentation, and got heavily into web enabled TV research. Not just TV web design & development but also communicating with TVs through a browser using the Network Service Discovery API and UPnP. So cool and full of potential!
Karl kept pushing open standards in the French web communities, and set up some tools for the team, including a Python-based vendor prefix survey tool. He also wrote a series of articles to raise awareness about HTTP, even for UX and front-end developers.
Luz showed us her talents, publishing some fantastic articles and doing great talks on WebGL. See Leaving Flatland: Getting Started with WebGL!
Mike put his JavaScript and Portuguese skills to good use, doing some killer talks in both the US and South America. Highlights included JS on your TV (actually, lots of useful stuff related to making web apps work on TV), and The state of browser dev tools. He also kept us chuckling with his dry wit, and showed us how to do lots of difficult things with Git, JavaScript, and command-line scripts.
Patrick had an exciting new arrival to the family (welcome Jack!), project managed Opera Dragonfly, streamlined the look and feel of the Opera TV Emulator, and was a ray of sunshine all year round.
Shwetank weaved his magic around India, spreading his HTML5 and CSS3 wisdom across many conferences, including Techshare and HTML5 Dev Con, and wrote some great Shiny Demos.
Tiffany applied her writing and coding talents to creating some really cool Shiny Demos, presentations, and articles, covering subjects such as CSS transform matrices, HTML5 web messaging and XHR2.
Vadim organised the fantastic Web Standards Days conference in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Kiev and Minsk; did some great talks in Russia, and lent us his fabulous design skills for many projects, including Shiny Demos!
Zi Bin managed the exciting new Oupeng project: the new mobile browser that's taking the Chinese market by storm.

Team newcomers Hallvord Steen, Kåre Byberg and Ola Kleiven helped the team to do our web compatibility work, and were generally just awesome fonts of knowledge. Together, the Core Compatibility team accomplished 196 commits to browser.js, representing 26,981 additions and 6,889 deletions.

Pat, Bruce, Andreas and Vadim also performed The Web Standards Hoedown at the Opera Xmas party in Oslo.

12 of the best

Our own answer to "The 12 days of Christmas": to finish off this article we would like to present our 12 "must read" publications for your delectation.

Marvel at JavaScript on your TV from Mike
Tiffany tells you How JavaScript behaves on Opera Mini
Use Flexbox to design responsively, with help from Chris
Grin at Luz's fantastic hipster dog
Be enlightened, as Karl explains the basics of HTTP in an easy-to-digest manner
Witness Bruce extolling HTML5 for content specialists
Touch events in detail: you'll love this preso by Patrick
Funk it up using Shwetank's excellent Warholiser demo
Check out some great coverage of the Network service discovery API, by Daniel
Responsive design: techniques and tricks to prepare your websites for the multi-screen future is a great look at RWD by Andreas
Be impressed by Vadim's incredible Shower open standards-based presentation tool: shwr.me demo and repository on Github.
Finish off with a heart warming, feel good story: Educating Bangladeshi school kids about the Web

Cover image by Jim Winstead.

Chris Mills

Chris Mills is a web technologist, open standards evangelist and education agitator, currently working at Opera Software in the developer relations team. He spends most of his time writing articles about web standards for dev.opera.com and other publications (such as .net mag and A List Apart), giving talks at universities and industry conferences, and lobbying universities to improve their web education courses. He believes that education is the answer to everything, but in particular he is passionate about using education to improve the overall content quality, accessibility, usability and future-viability of the Web.

He is the creator of the Opera Web standards curriculum, contributor to the WaSP InterACT project, and coauthor of InterACT with web standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design. In August 2011, he also accepted the position of co-chair of the newly-formed Web Education Community Group.

Outside work he is a heavy metal drummer, proud father of three and lover of good beer.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Comments

Martin Kadlec

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Merry Christmas to Opera Dev Rel. team! :)
Surferz World

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Great work, Bow Down... Happy Holidays to you all!!!
Charles Schloss

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Thats a lot of java consumed, how did you count all of that?

I guess a lot of absolute Opera will be had :)
Chris Mills

Friday, December 21, 2012

@Karl Dubost Yup, guilty! Although I love a decent draft of cider too. You will have to educate me on French cider, mr Cow!

@Charles just a _rough_ estimate ;-)
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