The first ever DIBI Web Conference proved to be a hit, drawing people from the other side of the globe.

Organised by the digital innovation centre Codeworks, Design it, Build it (DIBI) brought together designers and developers to hear from some of the leading web practitioners in the country.

Herb Kim, CEO of Codeworks, said the company was hugely pleased with the success of the first ever DIBI conference.

He said: “The response we received from the web community has really blown us away and we cannot thank them enough for their enthusiasm and support.”

The event, which attracted people from as far away as Australia and South Africa, left organisers confident that this is just the beginning.

Kim said: “The Next DIBI will be 8th June 2011 and already we have people purchasing tickets.  We look forward to a very bright future for this new gathering we have developed.”

Thumbs up for organisers and speakers

The speakers included some key people in the industry. The main presentation on the ‘build it’ side of the event was delivered by Michael Brunton-Spall – the man who rebuilt Guardian’s web site to tackle 1.1 billion requests a month.

Matthew Williams, North East freelance web developer, was extremely pleased with the conference.

He said: “I especially enjoyed hearing from Michael Brunton-Spall and how he optimised the Guardian site and rescaled it for millions of users. The way he explained step by step what kind of problems he ran into and how he solved them was really good.”

Williams was impressed by the organisation of the event as well as other speakers.

He said: “None of the talks went into too much detail in terms of actual code but focused on the practices used instead. That’s great because there’s so many different programming languages people use.”

Oli Wood of Wishli.st, one of the organisers of the event, said he was extremely happy with how the conference ran.

He said: “It’s difficult to get a list of technical speakers that appeal to the wide audience of technical practitioners, but there was something in there for everybody, no matter what language, framework or tech stack they worked in.”

The whole conference was streamed live and questions were regularly taken in from both the people watching the stream as well as via Twitter.

Find out more about DIBI via the event website: http://www.dibiconference.com/