A few weeks ago we headed north for Gavin Elliot‘s inaugural Industry Conference. Gavin was one of the forces behind Newcastle’s other web conference DIBI, which we’ve been to the last few years and loved, and Industry Conf is the product of his time after Codeworks. Taking place in the rather astonishing Turbine Hall, where Newcastle’s tram system used to be run from, Industry Conf saw 8 speakers from the UK and abroad share their views on the web design and development industry, via product design, cross cultural UX, education and, probably the strangest, insurance. The entire day was a great mix of speakers, and we’ve highlighted a few of our favourites from the day. I also managed to sketchnote a couple of the talks, which you can find at the bottom of the post.

Rachel Andrew and Perch

To begin the day, Rachel Andrew, co-founder of the tiny CMS Perch, took a non-design and non-development route to her talk by focussing on customer support. However, what came out of her talk was a great insight into how to build a successful product, how to use customer feedback and a few lessons and tips for anyone thinking of going into the realm of product. One aspect that Rachel talked a lot about was how much customer feedback affects Perch’s features and roadmap. She made the comment that “In business, you get what you want by giving people what you want.” However, she also went on to talk about how even though the more you talk to your customers, the clearer your roadmap gets, that you always need to protect the core use case of your product. If you only build in features that benefit the vocal minority, you’ll usually end up alienating and losing your majority.

There were two really interesting insights into how Drew and Rachel are trying to design support out of Perch. First, building in useful user feedback and writing solid documentation is one of the key ways of designing support out of your product. However, there will always be support requests. One of the ways that they’re looking at effective ways to scale is via their Registered Developers programme. Basically, they can advertise the skills of their passionate, skilled users to help the rest of their users when building or designing a Perch site. It’s a really good example of using your community to make your product better.

Christopher Murphy and Education

Christopher Murphy is one half of The Standardistas, the tweed-clad duo from Belfast, who as well as putting out various internet musings and writing great books on web design, also double as educators at University of Ulster. It was on this subject that Christopher was focussing on at Industry, and how we can make education in the web industry better. There were three key things that I took away from his talk: the benefits of a master/apprentice system, the skills we teach versus the skills we should teach, and the importance of paying it forward.

For the most part, the current way of learning in the web industry is either a solo-journey, where the student teaches themselves from a variety of different materials, or as a more traditional one-to-many teaching style, usually through conferences, workshops or courses. However, looking at the master/apprentice model, there are some obvious benefits. Not only is dedicated time given from someone who already knows their craft inside out, but there is also an exchange of skills and values going on between master and apprentice that shapes both parties.

Another interesting point Christopher touches on is that current ways of teaching design focusses on skills, techniques, craftsmanship and business. However, he suggests that we need to look at more fundamental aspects, including self belief, confidence, manners and politeness. He believes that focussing on these core values can help shape a designer much better than just tooling them with the practical aspects of the job.

Finally, Christopher echoed what I’ve been hearing a lot at conferences in the past few years, which is around the concept of paying it forward. Similar to Seb’s call to ‘Play, Create, Share‘, Christopher makes the point that the industry can only get better when we share and teach, whether it be through writing, speaking or just building and talking about it. I completely agree with the sentiment, and think it’s really important that there are people who are looking at what they can do to help shape our industry.

Josh Brewer and Twitter

One of the definite highlights of the day was seeing Josh Brewer, one of the design leads for Twitter, talk through the problems and process of redesigning Twitter. Firstly, it was refreshing to see a company being transparent about their design processes, especially a company as public and big as Twitter. This kind of insight is a great tool to teach others about key aspects of product design, and sharing your failures as well as your successes helps others learn the to dos and not to dos.

Josh took us through the original concepts they had for ‘new new Twitter’, including a key concept of content pivots, where you can easily swipe between your base feed, a photo feed, and a content feed. However, according to Josh, it was a classic example of design not talking to engineering early enough to discuss technical limitations for the platform that meant that a lot of the design features couldn’t be incorporated for this release. Another interesting insight was that a lot of the design features that get incorporated aren’t the result of endless meetings, brainstorms, testing sessions etc, but the insight of a single designer, who then prototypes their idea and convinces the rest of the team that it’s worth putting in. It reminds me of Jay Fanelli’s article for The Pastry Box Project, and how we should be mindful of the fact that when we complain publicly (and snarkily) about something in a service we use, there’s a good chance the single person who’s idea it is is potentially listening.

Wrapping up

This is just a snapshot of the day, and doesn’t quite sum up how inspiring the whole day actually was. From Ashley Baxter‘s debut talk about how she took over her dad’s insurance company at 18, and is now taking it down the software/service route, to the brilliant Noah Stokes talking about his journey as a designer, and the lessons he’s learnt along the way, it was a great day, without one flawed speaker. Special mention also goes to Jeremy Keith, who jumped in only a few days before to cover John Allsopp’s session. As always, Jeremy delivered a session with wit, flair and general awesomeness that few others match. Aside from the talks, it’s always lovely to visit Newcastle and talk to the folks who are building such an awesome web scene for the North East. A huge thanks to Gavin for having us at Industry.

As promised, here are the two sketchnotes I managed to pull together on the day:

 

Last Wednesday we closed nominations for this year’s Critters. We’re now working with the judges to whittle it down to a shortlist of three for each category, which we’ll be announcing in the next few weeks. To coincide with the closing of nominations, we also quietly launched the Critters site for 2013…

Now, apart from being a stunningly beautiful and amazingly brilliant little page (I designed it*), it also has one big feature that hasn’t been seen in previous years’ sites. Yes, this year we’re allowing *EVERYONE* to register to come along to the Ubelly party to end all Ubelly parties. For anyone who hasn’t been to a Critters before, previous years have featured karaoke booths, mannequins, retro games, geeky dancing (with mannequins usually), photo booths and other assorted fun/mischief. This year, we’re taking over Modern Jago, and can guarantee an experience unlike any other awards night you’ve been to… (more details on this in the coming months)

Oh, and you’ll also be part of the select few who vote to decide who will take home The Critter at the end of the night!

Tickets aren’t quite ready yet, but you can register your email address and we’ll give everyone on the list a heads up before (the completely free) tickets go on sale to make sure they nab them first.

What are you waiting for? Click the image below!

*And boy, am I humble…

A few months ago we put the call out for new writers to join the ubelly family, and received a ton of responses, so thank you to everyone applied. We have sifted, chatted and fought it out about who should join. It was an incredibly tough decision, but we are happy with the final five. So, without further ado, we bring you the nUbelly class of 2012…

Ashley Nolan

Ash is Ubelly’s token Welshman, and an avid fan of all things visual. He is an absolute games nerd, especially when it comes to retro gaming, and has recently been getting very excited about the possibilities with HTML5 and the various APIs out there, and what this means to gaming. He works at TMW in London as a front end web monkey, and has worked for folks including Ford, RSPCA, Xbox and DL Records in the past. In his spare time he tinkers about with the web, creating awesome things like ‘Media Query Mario‘.

Twitter: @dragongraphics
T’interwebs:  www.dragongraphics.co.uk

Amber Weinberg

Amber has been coding for over 12 years, and has been freelancing for 3. Originally from Nashville, Tennessee (I can’t wait to roll out all my country music jokes), she’s now based in London and earns her bread doing web and mobile development. If you haven’t seen her around, she has featured in .Net Magazine and GeekTalk, as well as speaking at Points, Reasons to be Creative and the upcoming Handheld Conf. She’s got a bit of a passion for handmade things, pie and dacshhunds, and more importantly seems to love the occasional animated gif (check out Day of the Dev for some cathartic gifs).

Twitter: @amberweinberg
T’interwebs:  www.amberweinberg.com

James Seymour-Lock

James co-runs a small, Eastbourne based design house called Simple As Milk, who have put out some rather lovely work over the last year or so. He’s a designer and developer who, in his own words, wants to “travel more but not work less.” He’s a massive lover of art and tattoos, sporting some rather lovely pieces himself. He’s spoken at a few small conferences, including WordUp and Points in Brighton, and has a huge passion for startups. Oh, and most importantly, he likes cats. He’s going to get on just fine here…

Twitter: @JamesSLock
T’interwebs: simpleasmilk.co.uk

Rachel Shillcock

So, that’s the nUbellyers! Make sure you say hi to them on Twitter and at any events that they’re about in the next year, and make sure you keep an eye out for their first articles on Ubelly!

On the 19th of October this year, we headed across to Bristol for the annual Web Developer Conference. Started five years ago by Alex Older from Bluefly Digital, Web Developer Conference (Also known as WebDevConf, or simply WDC) aimed to bring great speakers from the web design and development industry to the fair city of Bristol, to cater to what is a growing local industry. What started as a project for Alex as a student, has morphed into being a great little conference, with the likes of Ben Bodien, Paul Boag, Rob Hawkes, Syd Lawrence, Mark Boulton and Robbie Manson having graced the stage over the past few years, not to mention being shortlisted for last year’s Critters Awards. We first attended in 2010, heading back last year to host the pub quiz and cover the day. This year, Ubelly’s Andrew Spooner was invited to speak on the design concepts behind Windows 8, so we tagged along to cover the day with tweets and sketches…

Creativity and the ability to inspire

One of the themes of the day was around creativity and inspiration. David Burton, Head of Innovation at Redweb, kicked the day off talking about some of the thinking behind what he does in his day job. He talked through his concept of the five creative types, and the difference between creativity (lots of ideas) and innovation (focussing the creativity) and did a bit of rallying to arms, with his “We shouldn’t make thing because we can, we should make things that matter.” However, it was his “Better to try than be boring…” attitude that really caught me. In essence, David really made the point about people needing to “f**k about” a bit more to make interesting things, which is something we’ve been hearing a lot in the past year.

This was echoed later in the day with nUbellyer Syd Lawrence‘s “Get inspired to make stuff”. In case you haven’t come across Syd, he heads up the small dev house We Make Awesome Sh, where he basically plays with technologies for some rather awesome clients including Calvin Harris, Kylie Minogue, Intel and Cannes Lion, and was also behind the Ubelly Kinect Arial vs Helvetica game that you may have seen at a few conferences. As well as heading up his own dev house, Syd is also a developer evangelist for Twilio. I’m not entirely sure when he sleeps… Syd’s whole method is very much in the style of David Burton, where he messes about with a lot of different technologies, and then manages to make them meaningful later on. What I really love about the work that Syd does is that it doesn’t try and change the world. Instead, his work is meaningful because it delights people and makes their day a little better, much like the work of one of my other favourite developers, Seb Lee-Delisle and the Creative JS team. Just seeing these guys works inspires me to get out there and make stuff, or as Seb succinctly put it, to Play, Create and Share.

The one big takeaway that should be shared from Syd’s talk? Simply, “If you manage developers, make sure you let your developers play. It’s the way they stay creative.”

Online personas and the Wild Wild Web

The middle of the day seemed to be dominated by talk of the interwebs and social media. Keir Moffatt, who spoke about some of his social media experiences at Ignite Ubelly, took us through the wild wild web in a talk packed with western analogies. Random breakdancing interlude aside, it was interesting to see someone take such a broad view of where we’re going with the internet. Similar to the points that Syd and David made, Keir talked around how we the coders are the pioneers, defining what the web is. However, Keir’s statement was tinged with the burden of a heavy responsibility to make it better, especially with the current state of the internet with regards to privacy and copyright, verbal (or written) shootouts and patent farce. The internet is evolving how we as people are interact, behave and think, and as the pioneers we should keep this in mind.

On a similar topic, Mozilla’s Shane Tomlinson took to the stage to talk through the research that they’ve done into online personas via Mozilla’s Persona project. Shane makes the point that not only are our public identities being established at an earlier age these days, thanks to the internet, but our online self and offline self are in a constant feedback loop, with one informing the other and building who we are as people. Because of this, we need to be conscious of the different personas we hold as people, as our online and offline self are rarely carbon copies of each other. One of the other alarming things about our online personas is that whilst we are amassing huge amounts of data around ourselves, our security is terrible. One only has to look at the amount of big name sites that were hacked in the past 12 months.

Conversations around design

In case you haven’t seen them yet, Andrew has been working with a team to create a series of videos talking around the design process with some rather clever design folks. It all started when he was talking to an architect friend about sacred architecture last year. A simple picture of an arch in a nondescript church got them talking about how much time, thought and effort must have gone into something that looks so effortless in the end, from the way the light hits the arch to frame the contents, to the almost out of sight staircase within the arch, hinting at something more to find beyond. This talk later became the first in a series of talks with architects, audio producers, type designers and content strategists around the concepts of good design. You can see the full series over here, with more being released over the coming months. To conclude the session, Andrew talked through some of the opportunities for designers to get onboard with Windows 8, helping the ecosystem by creating beautifully designed and crafted apps. If you want to find out more about the dev and design process for Windows 8, check out Microsoft’s upcoming camps.

Following on from Andrew, Robbie Manson took to the stage with a reprise of his talk he did earlier this year at New Adventures, talking through the creative process as a designer, and how “the more invisible the tools, the more room for creativity”. Robbie’s calming Scottish lilt took us through the afternoon by questioning our design processes – from personas, and the need to keep these constantly moving and evolving (“Our life is a patchwork quilt of stories… we constantly evolve and change”) to the importance on focussing on people instead of tools. He also talks about the happy accidents we make as designers, and how we need to process these. Because of this, he sees the concept of ‘designing as problem solving’ a problem in itself, as design doesn’t equate in a final solution, but many possible outcomes. Finally, Robbie made clear his call for designers to document their work more, both for themselves to learn more about their own process, and for others to see and appreciate all the hidden things within the design journey.

Finally…

The only talk I didn’t cover off here was Jack Franklin’s polarising ‘Better Javascript’ talk, where he walked through his advice for JavaScript development and what we could be doing better as developers. However, we’ll be covering this in a more indepth guest post in the coming weeks on Ubelly.

WDC was once again an interesting, thought provoking experience that shows that you don’t need to be one of the big conference organisers to put on a day of relevant and inspirational talks from some of the best in the industry. However, what I really love about WDC is that it isn’t the usual fair, with seasoned vets on stage alongside completely new faces, providing a refreshing break from seeing the same faces at every conference. Congratulations to Alex and the team behind the event for another cracking event! Check out below for all our tweets in a Storify of the event…

1995.

The year that Braveheart was released.

The year that OJ Simpson was found not guilty.

When Command & Conquer, Warcraft II and Playstation in general pushed the average age of male virgins up by at least 5 years.

If you didn’t see us at Future of Web Apps or Web Dev Conf, then you wouldn’t have seen the Ubelly cards, stickers, USBs or other associated paraphernalia we have at the moment. We’re kind of going through a vintage internet throwback period, which we’re calling ‘Not Since 95′. This is for two reasons: One, 1995 was also the year that Windows 95 was released. Windows 95 was a real game changer when it was released. We’re thinking Windows 8, which was released just last week, will be the next one for Microsoft.

Two, it was the beginning of my foray into the world of the interwebs…

In 1995 I owned a Gateway 2000 486 with Windows 3.1*. It was the bomb. I filled my days with Commander Keen, Wolf 3D and Doom. My dad taught me my first bit of coding with PASCAL, and I spent far too much time trying to get past the under 18s test on Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. As a pre-teen, my life was pretty damn good.

At the end of 1995, my dad bought the family a Pentium 150 with Windows 95 on it. It had a CD-Rom drive, which was the FUTURE, and more importantly, it had a 28.8k modem attached to it, and a downloaded version of Internet Explorer.

This was where life changed.

Over the next five years I was like a fat kid who got locked in the world’s largest sweet store overnight. Learning the meaning of A/S/L. Taking three hours to download a single Nirvana song. Learning what would happen if you put a frog in a blender. Downloading every possible sound clip from The Simpsons and changing all of your system noises. Memes. Oh god, memes. Hamster Dance, Dancing Baby, All Your Base, Ate my Balls…

The world was mine.Perhaps the most important thing that happened to me just after 1995 was that I found Geocities. In 1997 a classmate came to school one day and told me he had a website. How did this happen? How was he allowed to have a website, and not me!? The outrage. I did what any good friend who has the highest levels of respect and platonic love for friends does… I downloaded his website, changed a few things and published it back to the internet as my own.

However, the important thing here is that through tinkering with his god awful markup, I started to teach myself how to put together a website. Over the next two years, with the thanks of GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like, I published about 20 website, including everything from fictional web design companies to Spice Girls Must Die, which on reflection probably explains my mother’s requests to stop listening to so much metal, put down the energy drinks down and have a nap…

The important thing about GeoCities and it’s ilk was that it allowed young geeks everywhere to dabble with designing and building websites at little to no cost, especially considering how exorbitantly prices webspace and domains were back then. These early tinkerers grew up, honed their skills and exist as the web designers and developers who are out making ridiculously awesome things today.

The way I see it, the web has had another explosion in the past few years with apps. With the explosion of the App Store, apps went from being something that only people on Twitter talked about to something that even my grandfather knows about. As a result, the same that happened with websites back in the mid to late nineties is happening again with apps. There are countless numbers of developers out there, already honing their skills that they’ve developed over the past few years to not only make awesome apps, but make awesome apps that might make them a few quid.

Here lies the problem… at the moment, most of the app stores out there are at saturation point. The App Store recently celebrated 700,000 apps, and the other app stores are anything but empty.

Enter Windows 8.

Having only been released last week, there’s a real opportunity to use the skills that you’ve honed designing and developing apps for other platforms to get in before the boat has sailed and reach ridiculous numbers of users. Bear with me while I throw some numbers at you…

690 million… That’s the amount of Windows 7 installs out there at the moment.

£24.99… that’s the rather modest price for an upgrade to Windows 8.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the opportunity. Not since Windows 95 was released back in my heyday has Microsoft had such a shift in their operating system. If you’ve played with it, you’ll probably agree with me that it’s most definitely a big step forward for the company. Now’s the time to start filling the Windows Store with awesome apps.

*This is from memory. However, my memory of anything past last week is sketchy at best. Wanted to note this, in case some proper, hardcore geeks start shouting about how Gateway 2000 weren’t technically called Gateway 2000 when they made 486s or something…

Want some help building a Windows 8 app? Come to a freeWindows 8 DevCamp and/or UX workshop at a location near you…

After two Ignite events in 2012 and a plethora of talks from Cellos to coffee to comic books, we’re rather excited to announce the return of Ignite Ubelly on the 18th of December!

This means that we’re opening speaker submissions to the community again, and are looking for a bunch of speakers to get on stage and do the Ignite thang (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) about a topic they’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be tech, just something you can wax lyrical about for 5 minutes without sending the audience into a coma…

We’ll also have a couple of Ubelly and Microsoft folks there who you can chat to about the world, Windows 8 or what they had for breakfast, and for any developers in the crowd, you’ll be able to chat to them about some of the great opportunities for app development now that Windows 8 has officially been released (almost).

This time we’ll be taking over the new Microsoft space in Shoreditch, Modern Jago from 6:00pm till 9:00pm, and then heading into Shoreditch for the official after party (venue TBC). We’ll be opening tickets on the 5th of November, so keep an eye out for the ticket release!

If you want to talk, then all you need to do is submit your idea for your talk below before Friday 2nd November. From there, we’ll select a bunch of them to speak at Ignite Ubelly! For those unfamiliar with the Ignite concept, Ignite talks are 5 minutes long, with each talk being accompanied by 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds. In terms of topics, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s something you’re passionate about!

A few months ago we quietly launched something that we’re starting to take around the country’s conferences. Reasons to be Creative saw the likes of Christian Heilmann, Jake Archibald and Laura Kalbag get on The Soapbox to do short talks on things that they’re passionate about (speaking, html slide decks and grids, in case you were wondering). We’re happy to announce that Future of Web Apps in London will see The Soapbox return, this time in amongst all the other stalls!

Now all we need are some great speakers…

Soapbox talks are 5 minute talks about things you care about. Whether they make your inner Hulk rise, make you feel warm and fuzzy, or usually result in a three hour lecture on the impact of animated gifs on modern society, we want topics that you really care about. You don’t need slides (although you can bring slides on USB if you wish, or bring old fashioned flipcharts/cards) and you will be strictly timed to 5 minutes.

For FOWA, we’ve got 10 slots over the two days, which will be happening during lunch. Want to talk? All you need to do is head to The Soapbox page and submit your talk!

Any questions? Hit us up in the comments or via the Twitters

So you want to build a game for Windows 8? Well we want to make it as easy as possible for you to do so. That’s why we thought it would be a good idea to compile all the resources we could into one place, so you can spend your time coding, not googling.

We’ve got everything you need to get going, from initial guides to the platform, to detailed guides on making the most of DirectX. And not forgetting that final important step, making some money from your hard work.

Getting started:

• Creating a Great Windows 8 UI game
• Developing Games on the Full Range of Windows 8 Devices
• PLAT-750T Build your first  Windows 8 game

Tools and Debate

• C++ and DirectX for Windows 8 UIGames
• From touch to gamepads: Master player input in your  Windows 8 UI game
• A lap around DirectX game development tools
• Introduction to DirectX for Metro style apps

DirectX Resources

• Introducing directXMath
• XAudio2 and Windows 8
• XInput and Windows 8
• Make use of headset audio for the Xbox 360 Common Controller via XInput and XAudio2
• High-Level Shader Language, FXC and D3DCompile
• Direct3D Feature Levels

Making Money

• Monetization Strategies for Windows 8 Games

So now you’ve got all the resources, what’s stopping you from creating your own Windows 8 Game?

The ease with which gamers can now download games- through their smartphone, the Xbox Arcade or the Playstation Store has given indie developers an easy way to reach consumers. The last two years has seen an explosion in the amount and success of indie games in the market, and the success of the following games is testament to this.

Angry Birds

A worldwide phenomenon, and the game which truly showed the potential of ‘casual gaming’. Rovio took a very rough concept drawing of an ‘angry bird’ and turned it into a game which has been downloaded over 500 million times and spawned  its own franchise.

From a development perspective, it provides a valuable lesson in designing for your platform- it made the most of the iPhone’s touch screen and didn’t try to replicate traditional console controls. Since then it’s taken over numerous platforms, including Android, Windows Phone and even the web.

Limbo

6 years in gestation, Limbo harks back to the classic 2d side-scrolling platform games of the 80s and 90s, but adds in a realistic physics system which developers back then could barely have dreamt of. The focus throughout development was on getting the mood right, with the minimalistic controls and setting both contributing to the feel that the player character really was stuck in a kind of Limbo.

Initially funded by its Danish creators and grants from their government, Limbo’s release on the Xbox Live Arcade in 2010 was heavily marketed as part of Microsoft’s ‘Summer of Arcade’ campaign and its success shows the potential such platforms offer to smaller developers.

Journey

The most mysterious game on this list, Journey lures gamers in, not with a deluge of information, but a drought. With no words- either written or spoken present in the game, gamers are occasionally drip fed information through cut scenes, but more often than not are left to figure out the game’s delights alone.

What could have been seen as a gimmick to keep costs down, instead becomes the central draw of Journey. Reviewers praised the emotional pull of the tale and compared it- both in feel and length to a artistic film.

World Of Goo

Despite being the oldest game on this list, clocking in at an ancient (in gaming terms) 4 years old, the merest mention of World of Goo has the ability to rouse even the most jaded of gamers. Developed on a shoestring budget raised from the developers’ savings , World of Goo blends a physics based puzzler with a charmingly off-beat plot, told through cut-scenes and ‘painted’ signs.

Minecraft

When talking about indie games, there is one that is impossible to leave out. Minecraft and its protracted development/testing phase, showed a different way of releasing games and that deep-down gamers still craved depth and the ability to build things.

Although not the most visually attractive of games- it was the sheer scale that made Minecraft addictive. No one cared that the game was blocky and jagged- we were all too busy trying to recreate the Death Star/the Pyramids/ Medieval Castles.

Where’s next for indie developers? Journey and Limbo have shown us what is possible when under the radar games receive some hype, but how else can new games market themselves? What have you been building?

Are you a designer or developer struggling to get heard? Are there conference you want to go to but can’t afford? Would you like a soapbox from which to stand on top of and scream your thoughts, ideas and insights? We may have an opportunity for you…

We’ve been running the Ubelly Writers Programme (called n.Ubelly) for just over six months, and it’s been a great success. We’ve had five writers attend a bunch of conferences, get their dancing shoes on at The Critters and chase a few features for Ubelly. Now it’s time to take on another five writers, arm them with some tech and conference tickets and send them off to report for Ubelly.

In case you missed it the first time around, n.Ubelly is an opportunity for up and coming tech and design folks to go along to conferences, get involved in Ubelly events and pitch features to the editorial team. We’re looking for 5 people from any background, and there’s only 5 days left to apply (submissions close on the 21st). This is a great opportunity for people who are relatively new to the industry to gain experience, network and get heard by Ubelly’s hundred thousand strong audience.

Don’t take our word for it though.

Here’s what some of our current team have to say anout their experience with N.uBelly:
“Writing for Ubelly has given me the opportunity to attend conferences I might not have attended before and hang out with some amazing people. I’ve also had the opportunity to be a technical reviewer on yet-to-be published books due to my Ubelly articles,” says Shaun Dunne, Code Geek and Responsive Web Samurai.

“Last year, I was privileged to be offered a place on the writing team for Ubelly” says digital & social strategist Wil Benton, elaborating with “It’s invaluable help for a young digital journalist – or anyone trying to make a name for themselves in the tech industry.” Finally, Will recommends that if you’re an aspiring writer with a passion for technology or anything related, he “can’t recommend applying for this year’s n.Ubelly enough. You’ll be looked after by a brilliant team; you’ll meet and talk to amazing people. I’ll be a part of Ubelly for as long as they’ll have me. That surely says it all!”

What are you waiting for? Head here to apply. Want some tips on how to apply? Read our top 5 tips for applying for n.Ubelly.