Breaking Development Conference = Mobile Web Awesomeness

If you’re working on mobile web, the Breaking Development Conference is something you must attend. Here’s why.

It is an intimate conference with one track focused on mobile web. That focus guarantees the conversations both in the room and outside the room are outstanding.

The speaker line up is crazy good. These are the folks at the leading edge of mobile web development:

• Peter-Paul Koch — Yes, Mr. Quirksmode himself is coming to the U.S. which means we’re going to get to hear first hand how messed up and inconsistent mobile devices are when it comes to standards support. In all seriousness, no one knows what mobile browsers support what better than PPK.
• Brian LeRoux — Brian is one of the leading PhoneGap developers and a javascript guru. I’ve seen him talk before and he is always hilarious and informative. He will also drink you under the table.
• Stephanie Rieger — One half of the dynamic duo that form Yiibu in the UK. Yiibu’s site is one of the first examples of building mobile-first responsive web design. Stephanie has a long history of working on mobile including building the mobile web templates that Nokia uses. Her topic expanding on Yiibu’s recent article about mobile context is one of the talks I’m looking forward to most.
• Nate Koechley — Nate helped create Graded Browser Support and Yahoo!’s User Interface and Design Patterns (YDP) Libraries. If ever we needed grades for browsers, it is in mobile. Nate’s going to be talking about the Taxonomy of Touch.
• Stephen Hay — I haven’t met Stephen yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I watched a video of him give a similar talk on Real-world Responsive Design at Fronteers 2010. In the video, he called out my media queries fools gold post. So at minimum, we’ll have something to talk about. 🙂
• Brian Alvey — First he was a guest on The Big Web Show. Then I saw him in some other context. Finally, I saw his name on the speaker list. I swear that every time I turned around I bumped into Brian’s name. Who is this guy? Well, he’s been doing web for years. He is working on the intersection of mobile and cloud computing now. I’m curious to hear what he has to say.
• James Pearce — James is wicked smart when it comes to mobile. He used to be the CTO of dotMobi and now works in Developer Relations for Sencha. He is working on a book about how to use current content management systems for mobile which is one of the big infrastructure issues I’m interested in. I haven’t met James in person yet, but feel like I know him. Good guy with strong opinions.
• Jonathan Snook — Who doesn’t know Jonathan Snook? It’s hard to forget a name like that and you’ll eventually run into one of his articles if you spend any time in web development. I’m keenly interested in his talk on making mobile apps that feel like native apps.
• Luke Wroblewski — I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience chanted “Luuuukkkkkeeeee” when he comes on stage. Luke coined the Mobile First mantra. His book on Web Form Design shed light on a topic we all should have been paying attention to long ago. And I’ve had the pleasure of reading a draft of his new book for A Book Apart on Mobile First. It is excellent. Plus a great guy to boot. Can’t wait to see him again.
• Brian Fling — Brian is another long time mobile guy. His O’Reilly book on Mobile Design and Development is one of the best introductions to the topic. His topic is one I’m looking forward to a lot. There have been years of mobile development before the iPhone. A lot of the lessons from that period are either forgotten or actively ignored. Brian’s going to talk about what the web community can learn from the mobile community.
• David Kaneda — The guy created jQTouch and works as Creative Director at Sencha. Nuff said.
• Ben Combee — Ben works for HP on WebOS. He’s going to talk about Enyo development tools. If you haven’t seen Enyo, you’re missing out.

I’m also speaking at the conference, but I’m an interloper amongst so many big names. This is a conference I would happily pay to attend.

If the lineup doesn’t alone make it worth while, there are two additional reasons you should consider attending:

1. The conference has speakers representing both sides of two currently hot debates: responsive web design vs. server-side detection and whether or not there is a mobile context. I’m certain everyone will be cordial, but I’m also sure the speakers aren’t going to agree all of the time. That makes for a more interesting conference.
2. With speakers like this, everyone is going to want to step up their game.

So that’s my pitch. This is going to be a great conference. There’s still time to register. Come join us.