Posts in the Events category

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that spending 4 of my last 10 days at conferences has been overwhelming. Looking back, QCon was a great experience, but geared far more towards seasoned software engineers rather than anyone in the web development field. Apart from friday which had a great HTML5 track.

Today, I had the joy of attending the State of the Browser event in London.

With representatives from Google Chrome, Mozilla, Opera and towards the end, RIM, there was a lot to talk about and a lot to learn. There was a last minute change to the schedule with the Microsoft rep having to pull out due to personal matters, but he wasn't missed by me or many others. It was a great day for everyone to show where things had moved in the last 10 years or so.

As was rightly stated, 10 years ago, the situation was very different with browsers doing their best to sell themselves on their unique features. Although this may still happen in todays world, the collaboration and thought that goes into each new feature is impressive.

My browser of choice is currently Chrome and having seen Michael Mahemoff now speak twice, I've a great appreciation for where Google, Apple and the W3C have taken us. Mozilla really impressed today and Opera were a big surprise. All positive and all clearly proposing something different.

A member of the Mozilla team described Chrome as the window to the web, very little clutter, with the browser just delivering whatever is asked of it. Firefox was then described as a 'butler' in the sense that it not only delivers the web, when you ask for something a little more, Firefox is there to offer it to you. A fantastic analogy as for me, Chrome is what I expect of a browser, while my colleagues, friends and clients could all require something very different and find the Firefox, Opera or even IE offer that something.

The day offered two breakout sessions where I attended one talk on CSS3 by Chris Mills and another on optimizing web apps by Martle Ubl. The first was very interesting for me because I realised a few things I've struggled with CSS3 all comes down to documentation and a lack of time to experiment on my part. All things I'm going to push for both at home and work.

The HTML5 talk was a lot quicker but concise. Some of the advice was common sense on reflection but not always put into practice.

Why, in a loop, read and write again and again? Why not read and read and read and then write just once? Surely a lot quicker? It was described as being a magnitude faster, but I'm not sure how true that is. Would be interesting to see though. Especially versus a loop that contained multiple append()'s as apposed to .text() or .html() (jQuery methods).

Being on a Saturday was never going to be ideal, now I only have half a weekend, but I enjoyed it and took enough away for it to have been worthwhile. Big thumbs up!

Check out my State of the Web set on flickr and follow the feed on twitter.

For three days this March, I attended the QCon conference in London. It was my first QCon and something that turned out to be quite an interesting few days.

Hosted in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, the conference was hosted as a way of reaching out to programmers, or software engineers, and promoting a range of products, services and work processes.

There were 15 tracks all together and it was great to have the luxury to mix and match.

Day 1 featured an interesting iOS/Android track.

There was the unforunate site of people promoting their companies and services through their talks, most noteably Adobe, but generally, the speakers were dishing out their experiences and messages in interesting and positive ways.

Further to that, I'd even say that some people were actually chatting shit. The track on REST wasn't bad but towards the end, it was a load of bullshit, hacks and just general nonsense.

Representatives from both Twitter and Facebook both made appearances, Facebook had more than one, giving great talks. The biggest plus I took away from QCon was knowing that established services like Twitter and Facebook face problems with scaling, caching and availability almost as much as your average web developer with a dream of being the next big thing.

They both showed they knew how to handle it, but for me, Twitter's scalability seems far more sensible than Facebook.

Frasier Spears gave an inspiring talk on his experiences of tooling children at the school he works at with iPad. They now have a 1:1 ratio of iPads to kids and from the talk he gave, you would expect the iPad to be an actual educational tool. For me that made Apple's journey over the last 20 years come around full circle. Apple's were once the dreadedcomputer in the corner that no one understood, but under Steve Job's guidance they've now become the 'computer' that everyone wants a piece of.

Mike Lee also gave an inspirational talk, titled How to Make Apps That Don't Suck. Great title and the presentation lived up to the title. As a developer that's been around and done so much, he's now using his time to promote better end products. Why develop an app and then release update after update to give your users when you want, when you could just give them what they want in the first place. Not a luxury that everyone has, but something we should all aim for.

Day three saw the HTML5 track and the promotion of Single Page Web Apps. Great idea, but not the easiest to execute. Well, that's not strictly true anymore thanks to things like HTML5 and the History API. Neither is compatibe with all browsers right now, but an excellent way forward when you know that Microsoft are trying to kill IE6.

All in all, QCon was a good experience. I'd definitely go again, but pay more attention to what's on offer. Day three was the best for me. I've only highlighted a few things above, but for the more traditional software engineers (as apposed to web developers) there's a lot to see.

You can check out a handful of photos that I took, over on flickr.

When it comes to Apple, I don’t really take the time to speculate but I thought now would be a great time with the imminent launch of the 4th generation iPod Touch, it seems like a great time to start.

My iPod history

The launch of the original iPod saw a new era for music. It’s taken an extremely long time for record companies to come around to the idea of music being digital and I feel that consumers are still being ripped of. Ripped of quite a lot since the introduction of Apple’s 3-tier price structure in iTunes.

With the release of the iPod Mini, I found my own way into the iPod market as I needed an affordable storage device but wanted a small factor MP3 player too. The Mini fit perfectly, although it’s 4Gb capacity wasn’t ideal for the video editing projects I embarked on in University.

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I wanted to write about the Lee Evans show I saw on Saturday, but the weekend just ran away with itself and I ended up watching Transformers on Blu-ray last night (a story for another day)!

I could not fault the man for anything.

After just 5 minutes, I could feel tears of laughter rolling down my face and had to remember to breathe! The guy is, without any exaggeration, a complete genius.

He came out on time and performed for near enough 3 hours, including his trademark encore piece, his physical interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody. That's probably the only performance piece I'll talk about here because the tour is still on and I don't want people to stumble across this and ruin the fun for them. I purposely ignored a Facebook group because the first few posts where about his jokes from the Big tour.

I saw Bill Bailey at Wembley almost exactly a year ago (give or take a week) and that was one thing I'd ticked of my list of things to do. Seeing Lee Evans live was another and possibly one of those things competing for the very top. When I see Liverpool play at Anfield next week, that will most certainly be another!

If you can find tickets for the Big tour, please go. You will enjoy yourself and you will laugh. Guaranteed. If you can't, get the DVD. I will be adding it to my collection.