@media London 2007

My first @media and it was a lot of fun.

Preperation

Wednesday evening started with boxes, lots of boxes which contained @media bags to be stuffed, lots of bags. Job done we wandered down to the pub in time for a few pre-event drinks and to show off our dashing orange shirts.

Day One

Unfortunately I missed most of Jesse James Garrett’s opening session and some interesting bits of Jason Santa Maria , including taking colour palettes from photographs and nature. The first real session of the day for me was the High-Noon Shoot-Out between Drew McLellan and Simon Collison , I think Drew won, but he did come prepared with props.

Lunch followed, as did some excellent talks from Dan Cederholm and Mark Boulton. I’d seen mark speak quite briefly before at SXSW, but hearing a ‘full set’ was great. Joe Clark ended the day with the alarmist “When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem” – it was certainly interesting and made sense, but felt a bit odd to me.

The Party

Clockwerk was heaving! When we arrived the queue for the bar was to the door. Gradually people realized there was a bar upstairs as well ad the rush subsided. I was impressed how long the free bar lasted, considering some events I’ve been to where thirsty geeks will exhaust it in minutes.

It was nice to do some socialising with those I knew and those I didn’t. It was also nice to see a bunch of the Last.fm guys there and have some people (who i’d yet to tell) congratulate me on my new job there.

Day Two

Friday started with John Hicks’ with a talk on creatively for non-designers, what I caught was interesting. Next up was a split session between Hannah Donovan and Simon Willison talking about Last.fm and lawrence.com respectively. Discussing actual real world sites, rather than fairly vague theory, this session was by far the highlight of the event for me.

Before lunch I saw Håkon Wium Lie , one of the creators of CSS, discussing browsers, the $100 laptop and some of the more tantalising aspects of CSS3. Afterwards Dan Webb did his Javascript Kung Fu, very interesting – even if he does prefer Prototype to jQuery.

The day closed with the hot topics panel of; Richard Ishida , Dan Cederholm , Jeremy Keith , Joe Clark and the internet’s Drew McLellan. I was actually quite disappointed by the panel, for various reasons, but mainly for the fact half the time was spent ‘discussing’ various W3C-isn’t-working issues. Important as they may be the whole thing felt agendered and not very fun, which was a shame with the interesting lineup of panelists.

With everything wrapped up I finished my tea and we all wandered down to the pub again, lovely.