Brighton is a small city that packs a punch in the technology world. It's the place to go if you work in the web industry and is home to a huge amount of cutting edge talent thanks to it's vibrant tech community. A wide range of small events for people within the web & wider technology industry are put on every week in Brighton, and some of the bigger ones happen in the Autumn. This year, many of the large and small events are clustering in September and coming together under the banner of the 'Brighton Digital Festival', co-ordinated mainly by local company Lighthouse.

There is too much going on in the festival to cover in one article, so here we'll look at the big highlights.

dConstruct (September 2nd)

The best known technology conference in Brighton, this year marks the seventh dConstruct. The theme this time is "Designing digital products" and will look at how the gap between physical and digital products can be bridged, with talks on interaction design, mobile design and ubiquitous computing.

Every dConstruct has been widely regarded as excellent and it is known for it's thought provoking talks which cater to the more considered website worker and app maker. If you're an industry professional, or would like to become one, dConstruct is an excellent conference to attend.

Update (September 5th)

A new conference organised by international speaker Aral Balkan, Update is all about mobile design and development, with a solid interest in user experience, which Aral believes is key to producing a good application for mobile devices.

While this is a new conference, Aral has experience in running events and has talked at numerous conferences in the past, and he has a top selling iPhone app under his belt. This promises to be an interesting and enlightening day and a must for anyone writing or thinking of getting in to creating iPhone apps, or ones for other mobile platforms.

Flash on the Beach (September 11-14th)

The biggest Flash conference in Europe is back for another three days of talks about the widely used web technology. This conference always has top names within the Flash community to spread the word about the latest things you can do with it, future developments with the player and language, and information on the up and coming alternatives like HTML5 with Javascript. Judging by previous years the days will contain a bit of controversy, a set of shiny demos, and a hell of a lot of useful information.

Running since 2006, if you create Flash games, video, rich applications or anything else in Flash, this is a must-attend conference. And being by the sea, you'll get time to visit the beach and relax in Brighton's pubs too.

Barcamp Brighton (September 10-11th)

This will be the sixth Barcamp Brighton 'unconference', a two day event full of many and varied talks, panels and presentations. Barcamp's are free and are like a conference in that there are many talks going on at the same time, but unlike a conference because they are run by their attendees, and every attendee is asked to give a talk, run a panel or in some way get involved with making it a fun and interesting event.

While the idea of giving a talk may be daunting, it can be on any topic and this gives a huge variety to the day. Previous events have included talks on why Cornwall is it's own country, how engines work, living through depression, and how to take better photos. Being mainly attended by web industry people, there has been a broad range of technical topics such as using Drupal, a primer on making Wordpress themes, Google Analytics tutorials, helping website scale to large numbers of users, and live coding talks.

If you like a bit of chaos and serendipity in your conference, Barcamp is for you.

WP-Brighton (September 23rd)

Another new conference, this is run by the Brighton Wordpress developers group, WordUp. It will host a number of practical talks for using the popular Wordpress blogging platform/CMS software, helping attendees understand how to use it to promote their or their client's business, run large sites with it, and how to push it to it's limits without causing crashes. If you use or develop for Wordpress, this is a day for you.

Whatever area of technology you're in to, Brighton's got something for you this coming September. It promises to be a great month with some amazing visitors coming to the city, both to give talks and to see them. If you're in the tech industry, you really should come and join in.

Coming to the city for a conference or holiday in Brighton? We have a wide range of rooms, apartments and cottages available for short term lets. There is more about the Brighton Digital Festival here.