Tuesday, August 19, 2008
I woke up unexpectedly at exactly 4:00 AM, got up at exactly 4:08 AM, and typed some thoughts that I will probably share at a later time. An Event Apart San Francisco Day 2. I had a great time at An Event Apart. A lot of it was review, and a lot of it enabled me to confirm that I've been doing things mostly right all along, but I also learned a lot and have a ton of things to look up later. I highly recommend it for anyone who builds websites. Here's the feedback I later provided for today's speakers at An Event Apart:
- Meyer: I don't ever need to do such heavy-duty troubleshooting but can come back to this if I do. Still very worthwhile.
- Featherstone: Timing got a little off near the end, but what fantastic examples! I'm not doing AJAX stuff yet, but this will be helpful when I do.
- Celik: No printed slides - wah! :-( Links called "Add to my Outlook calendar" or "Add to my iCal calendar" all seemed to point to (technorati?)—would have appreciated how we would do this ourselves without relying on a technorati generator.
- Goto: Was not useful to me since we have only 2 coders on our web team, but I can see it would be useful for larger teams.
- Veen: Did he speak about the next gen of web apps? Mostly not, but I don't mind since he still had plenty other interesting things to say. A pleasure to listen to, probably on any topic.
Also:
Q: Would you advise a friend or colleague to attend? Why or why not?
A: Absolutely! It doesn't matter if you're a beginner, intermediate, or expert web worker—An Event Apart unquestionably brings you the sharpest experts in the field discussing the latest topics. You'll learn more than you expected, and you won't be disappointed!
Q: Any other thoughts you'd like to share with us?
A: Thanks for starting/ending on time, having presenters repeat the question (most of the time), great sound & video (except for the laptop sound), presuming we know stuff—not explaining every acronym or thing. I wish you had a Facebook group set up before the event so we could identify others with common interests and meet up during the event - e.g., if I knew who else was a Bay Area higher education web developer I would probably have arranged to sit with them at lunch. Some slides didn't match the conference notes—I was lost during Liz Danzico. Ask everyone to use tinyurl *everywhere*—even the followup AEA email had long URLs that got broken in Entourage 2008. Some slides with black backgrounds did not reproduce well—e.g., Meyer (Debug/Reboot). Cigarette smoke drifting in from the sidewalk was a small problem—it gives me headaches almost instantly, so I am ultrasensitive. Conference notes could have included headshot photos for speakers *and* thumbnails of those photos next to their names on the page headers. Room was too cold, but could just be me.
Dinner at Tony Roma's (415-374-2733, 2 Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, San Francisco, California, USA 94111) with Patrick: small caesar salad, bbq burger with onion rings, newcastle for Patrick; bbq chicken sandwich, hot water for me. $28.72 after a $5 tip. Dining experience was just okay, but we went because Patrick had never been and we didn't know what better there was in the area. (I wasn't in the mood for Schroeder's.) Stretches.