My First Web Conference
I’m fresh out of my first @media ‘08 conference sat with a cup-o-cha waiting for my train at Paddington and feeling decidedly inspired enough to write about it. I have to confess, before today I was a complete conference virgin. Well, web conference anyway. Quite shocking considering I’ve been in the industry for the best part of decade but working as the only web developer in a software house, I struggle to get the justification to be sent on anything remotely interesting. Having just popped my web – slash - “geek chic” conference cherry, I realised this must be a rare point of view in the industry and thought I’d let all the other conference virgins out there know how it went.
Needless to say, I saw enough macbooks and Linux based Asus eee pc’s to make Bill Gates weep tears of blood. The whole event felt ridiculously comfortable. I put it down to all the tech blogs and mailing lists I read, I knew exactly what to expect. Anyone coming from a more MS conference background will be as refreshingly surprised as I was at the equal ratio of male to female geeks. Not to stereotype but this could be down to the design types there.
I was prepared for the culture of people using laptops during the sessions, but quite annoyed by the constant tip tapping in my ear. I mean, what are they doing? Work? Are they actually blogging as they listen? The sessions aren’t that hands on or involved enough to try things out as you listen.
The whole event felt as much like a social event as it did a web conference which was great, especially if you’re looking to make contacts. The free beer helped things along nicely and I had no trouble finding some disposable friends to go for a meal with. If you’re heading to one of these events by yourself, I don’t think you’ll be sitting in silence for two days.
As for the actual conference itself, I found myself listening to a lot of things I already know. Some of the highlights for me though included Steve Faulkners talk on WAI-ARIA. This got me quite excited as my day job is developing online services for local authorities and I’m incredibly restricted by accessibility requirements. It’s potentially going to open up a whole world of JavaScript goodness for me. The random highlight for me was Steve Faulkners screen reader being amplified across the hall at 156756 words a second for what felt like a small eternity.
I also really enjoyed “Exploring the Serverside: Rails & Django” with James Adam and Simon Willson. It was a lot more technical and hands on than most of the other talks, complete with live coding for the rails demonstration. I’ve barely touched on these technologies yet so it was a really good overview for me.
In the end, it’s left me with a pretty dodgy stomach from taking advantage of all the free beer but feeling inspired to try out some new things.