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?

Next up was Javascript Libraries: Friend or Foe? with Cameron Adams, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge, Dan Webb, and Simon Willison. As primarily a software developer, I found this rather frustrating. The entire session was a discussion of whether Javascript libraries were useful or not, but I found the arguments on both side lacking in rationale: “I don’t like libraries, I like to cut & paste the code I need”, for example. There was a lot of focus on the Dojo Toolkit but I didn’t really take much away from this.

Enter Cameron Moll presenting Mobile Web Design.

This was of an excellent presentation (and Cameron wins the ‘Slide Design’ award hands down), introducing the issues surrounding designing for mobile devices, discussing how such designs should be approached (think: “What is contextually relevant?”) and introduced me to a worrying number of new acronyms and buzzwords (Flash Lite, LBS, RFID, XHTML-MP, .mobi). There’s no escaping the fact that mobiles are going to be an increasingly large target market for web designers and this was a perfect introduction.

Lack of time management skills (and talking to Cameron) meant I missed the first part of CSS Project Management with Rachel Andrew, Roger Johansson and Dave Shea, but I took a lot out of what I saw. It was a panel discussion of different techniques and tools for managing CSS projects and it was interesting to hear people’s differing approaches. When the topic of development environments was raised, I didn’t get a chance to plug Karlis Blumental’s astonishingly good WeBuilder product, so there’s a quick plug. If only it were available on the Mac. Gah!

The last presentation was the Modfather himself, Andy Clarke, who was looking seriously sharp:

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design was great, taking Andy’s scrapbook inspirations and applying them to the web, questioning and challenging designers to take the initiative and push CSS to the limit. In essence, forgot trying to make sites look identical in IE 4, IE5 and Safari 1 and instead, make them look awesome in Firefox and Safari 2 and leave them to just work in older browsers. This is just so right that I’m sure this will be the next web design movement. Look out for the book (”Transcending CSS”) in the autumn.

To wrap up, Molly Holzschlag, Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik held a “hot topics” panel discussion about AJAX, the World Cup, cheese and the Next Big Thing (Microformats – you heard it here last). Here’s the panel, minus Tantek (sorry dude):

You can probably tell I had a great time. I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years and this was, without question, the best I’ve been to. Not only were the presentations superb, but the atmosphere was friendly and the speakers wanted to talk to people over coffee. If they weren’t speaking, they would have been there anyway! And that pretty much says it all.

Following that, I listened to Chris Wilson talk about what to expect in IE 7. Although this product is always going to be seen as Microsoft catching up with the rest of the browser pack, it does look like it has some rather cool features, namely Open Search. I expect this will be one feature Firefox, Opera et al will all be looking at with interest.

After lunch (nice cakes) was The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0 with Andy Clarke, Patrick H. Lauke, Gez Lemon, and Ian Lloyd. To be honest, this was the one presentation which didn’t work for me and I got the impression that WCAG 2.0 was rather unpopular with the presenters. The gist I got was that the guidelines are complex, hard to understand and, unfortunately, inaccessible. Shame, but perhaps they’ll improve before they’re finalised. Here’s three of the panel:

The final presentation of the day was Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps by the thoroughly energetic and inspiring Jeff Veen. It was an excellent explanation and demonstration of the latest Web 2.0 (i.e. AJAX) applications, providing real insight into the techniques used by the leading companies, using Jeff’s own experience working at the forefront of the web. Go Jeff!

Shamefully I didn’t go to the after party and instead skipped out immediately after Jeff left the stage to watch the match which, for the last 10 minutes at least, was a perfect end to the day. Super Stevie!

The line-up is fantastic, with the some big names from the web world presenting. Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, Cameron Moll, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith… the list goes on. What’s more, the venue is only a 20 minute walk from home!

Of particular interest is CSS 3: Fact or Fiction?, Pixels, My Ass by Patrick Griffiths (who, we’re shocked to discover, doesn’t look like Patrick Stewart as we’d imagined) and Internationalisation: Awakening the Sleeping Giant.

We’re concerned that Dave Shea’s Strategic CSS Management might be a little unpopular. No reflection on Dave of course, it’s just that his talk clashes with England’s World Cup match against Trinidad & Tobago. Sorry Dave, duty calls but we’ll see you in the pub afterwards :)