@media London 2008 round-up. Day 2
Free beer is great. Until the morning after.
Nate Koechley, front-end engineer with Yahoo, was up first with today’s keynote. Nate is another good speaker and this was a interesting talk, explaining front-end engineering and discussing a whole bunch of performance tips and tricks, approaches to unit testing. Stuff like that.
Jonathan Snook, in Building on the Shoulders of Giants, talked about frameworks, APIs, Flash. I didn’t really take much away from this to be honest.
Next up I had track-indecision: a choice between John Resig (Mr. jQuery) talking about JS libraries or a ‘For Example’ session by The Guardian and Dopplr. I plumped for the example session but it was totally underwhelming. Marc Pacheco from The Guardian took about 10 minutes to discuss how they have separate 8 CSS files in development which get merged into one in production and how he once merged two CSS files in Subversion and put it live, seemingly without checking, resulting in missing content. I think he might need a copy of Beyond Compare. The Dopplr talk was a bit more interesting from a startup point of view, but I didn’t take much away from it really. I did find out that guardian.co.uk runs off a bespoke CMS written in Java and is served by Resin and Apache, which my inner geek found quite interesting.
In the afternoon the Communicating Best Practices panel had it’s moments, but Exploring the Server Side: Rails & Django by James Adam (from Revoo) and Simon Willison was far better. James did a brave live demo of Rails, which (bearing in mind I’m a Rails developer) I thought was really well explained, whilst Simon talked about how he replicated the @media website in Django which was actually quite outstanding. I didn’t know much about Django (or Python) beforehand, but now I have a much better picture and I’m so glad I use Ruby and Rails ;-)
The day finished, as did Day 1, with a ‘hot topics’ panel which was really quite dull. I’d much rather have two more solid presentations than these camp fire chats. I think they can work really well at smaller events like Highland Fling, but on this scale they’re always a bit unfulfilling.
I wouldn’t say it was a vintage @media year, but it was really enjoyable and I met some really great people. The venue, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank was just about perfect — really good acoustics (obviously) in the theatres, comfy seats with lots of space, massive socialising area with good food and drink all day. All that and only one tube stop from my house — nice!
Same again next year?
Posted by Olly on May 31, 2008 at 8:11 am in @media, atmedia, conference and tagged with @media, @media2008, atmeda, atmedia2008, london
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Nice blog about the event. I have to agree that I thought the panels were a bit…dry. I thought the day 1 panel was ok but day 2 was just annoying. For me I get a little tired of Microsoft bashing for the sake of crowd pleasing, did you see that?
I liked Indi’s presentation but I think it’s one of those that you may do without thinking anyway, i.e. how to tease out the requirements without rushing in with the solution. But there’s no way I could keep track of the mile long diagrams though!