Recently, I was fortunate enough to speak at WebDU (Web Down Under), “A rock concert for geeks”. WebDU is an Australian based web conference which boasts the highest speaker to attendee ratio of any major RIA/Web 2.0 conference. The conference itself was exceptional. I had the pleasure of speaking alongside some of the most recognized and inspirational personalities in the industry, including Jesse Warden, Mike Chambers, Mike Downey, and Ted Patrick, to name a few of my American counterparts who attended. Of course, I also had an opportunity to meet some awesome Aussie developers. I was most impressed by Scott Barnes, Lachlan Hardy, Collis Ta’eed, the guys from Nectarine, and the entire team from Daemon (whom also happen to be the conference organizers). It was also nice to see and meet Brandy Fortune, the first woman that I’ve ever seen speak at a conference (I’m excluding Lynda Weinman, the woman behind FlashForward because she is in a class of her own ). Brandy gave a great presentation on usability for designers and developers, you can read a great review of it here at flashmagazine.com.

I spoke on using Yahoo! APIs in Flash. I ran through the latest and greatest offerings from the Yahoo! Developer Network, including the recently revamped search SDK , the awesome AS3 additions by Alaric Cole (Alaric, if you have a blog please let me know, I couldn’t find it), and the latest book to make it to press by Yahoo’s Charles Freedman. I also covered security, best practices, and some real-world implementations of using web services. I also made mention of VUVOX, an awesome startup I have been working with for the past few months alongside a slew of other media & web rock stars. I’ll be blogging in greater detail about VUVOX later.

The conference was freakin’ amazing. The food was spectacular, the accommodations were immaculate, and the general vibe of the community was electric. It was fun (re)connecting with familiar (and some not so familiar) faces from Adobe. The guys from Nectarine sort of took me in and we hung out like we’ve known each other for years. Lachlan and I also spent quite a long time just conversing and sharing ideas… what a blast. After the show I hung out with an engineer from Yahoo! AU, which was cool. We conversed on ways to help Yahoo! embrace and harness the power of Flash and related platforms, which hopefully he can succeed in achieving or at least influencing. My flights to and from Sydney also stopped over in Honolulu, so I had to spend a few nights in Waikiki (hey, it’s a tough job … but somebody’s got to do it )

I’ll be posting my WebDU presentation materials and code shortly, and writing the blog posts that my audience demanded soon … so stay tuned. Sorry for dropping off of the blog thing for a while, I was just too busy to have time to think. However, I’m back and better than ever, and look forward to sharing my ideas and humble perspective with the community for a long time to come.

Peace.