FullCodePress

FullCodePress Sponsor interview – Opera’s Lachlan Hunt

11 May 2009 | Russ Weakley | 1 Comments

1. Lachlan, what exactly do you do at Opera? Is your role shrouded in mystery?

I do quality assurance for Opera’s Presto engine, involving filing and reviewing bugs and testing. I also work on with the W3C on web standards within the HTML5 and Web Applications working groups.

2. We have heard rumours about Opera Turbo coming out soon. First of all, what is Turbo and how does it work?

Opera Turbo is a technology designed to reduce bandwidth usage and speed up browsing, particularly for users with low speed connections, such as dialup or congested public wifi networks. Opera Turbo uses a technology called the “Opera Web Optimization Proxy”, which is a bit different from the Opera Binary Markup Language used in Opera Mini. Web sites layout and text will look exactly the same, but image resolution may appear considerably lower as a result of the compression. Dynamic Web technologies such as XmlHttpRequest and Flash are supported, but some plugin content will load only after clicking on the empty element.

3. While we are talking about cool new opera toys, can you tell us about Dragonfly? How does it compare to Firebug?

Opera Dragonfly is a debugging tool designed to help developers debug their HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It features many of the same tools that many are familiar with in Firebug, but also includes some other really nice innovations. In particular, Remote Debugging is a technology that allows to you debug a browser instance on one device from another machine over the network. This is particuarly advantageous for mobile devices, as it allows developers to test and debug on the actual devices, rather than relying on emulators.

4. Can you tell us a bit about Operas focus on web developers?

Opera has always had a strong focus on web standards and in an effort to help more developers make better use of those available, we introduced the Web Standards Curriculum. This is a series of 50 tutorials covering a range of web standards, designed for teachers to incorporate into their lessons, or for students to supplement their studies.

5. Finally, as a seasoned FullCodePress veteran, what are you expecting from this years FullcodePress? more importantly, who do you think will win?

I expect we’ll see a lot of really exhausted participants doing all sorts of crazy things before the night is over. I’m confident that the contestants will be able to make it through the night, but whether or not they finish on time with a functioning website is anyone’s guess.

After the shocking victory by the Kiwis in 2007, I’m hoping the Aussies will put up a good fight and claim the prize this time round.