Full Frontal

Last Friday I trundled down to Brighton for the one day Javascript conference, Full Frontal.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a conference, as the last few I’d been to felt like a lot of money for not much value.

I guess my expectations from a conference are different to some peoples, but I like to come away feeling like I’ve learned something new, or been massively inspired to change my workflow.

I’d seen Full Frontal advertised a number of times before, and have always really respected Remy Sharp, the organiser (especially for his jQuery for Designers site - it’s helped me explain jQuery to plenty of junior devs).

It was also great to see a few old colleagues from Forward there too.

Great speakers

Phil Hawksworth’s talk about Excessive Enhancement was really funny, especially as it’s a subject I’ve bored many colleagues about in the past. I also have to admit to a little bit of slide deck envy.

I was blown away by the presentation by Cloud9’s Rik Arends- it’s amazing how much JS apps have improved in the past few years - being able to develop them, and deploy them all in the browser shows what’s possible already.

Watching Glen Jones dragging and dropping elements between seperate browsers, and downloading files by dragging them on to the desktop was really engaging. It gave me loads of design ideas that we could implement on the new CMS we’re building to support the Sky News website & iPhone app.

Finishing with a talk by Marcin Wichary from Google, the guy who made the awesome Les Paul Google Doodle, was a stroke of genius. There was plenty of insight into the process of making a Google Doodle (minifying JS by hand!), and it was an entertaining way of finishing a very technical day.

A blast from the past

I didn’t originally notice Brendan Dawes on the speaker list, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him get on stage (and totally rock the crowd).

Brendan had given a talk to my course when I was at Uni, all those years ago, and also paid a visit to our final year showcase. I loved what Brendan’s company, MagneticNorth, was doing, and asked him if it would be worth getting in touch.

His polite response was that my work looked quite ‘corporate’ in style, and that’s not what MN were working towards. I was a bit gutted, but I took it in my stride. It’s amusing to now look back at my work over the past 8 years and remember the number of large corporate clients I’ve worked for.

I guess that Brendan Dawes guy really knows his stuff!

Would I recommend it?

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and am looking forward to when next years tickets go on sale. I’ll definitely be going again.