Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

This Tuesday I broke from my normal evening routine and headed to Harborne to the offices of PSL Connect. I went to investigate PHP West Midlands and to hear a talk on the Symfony Framework by Darren Beale of Siftware. He’d some along to Multipack on Saturday, so it seemed fair to return the favour and do some cross-group networking.

Overall I was very pleased with the excursion.  Darren is an entertaining speaker. The talk was a solid broad-strokes introduction to Symfony, which left me with a flavour of the thing and enough insights to compare it with others (I’ve a passing familiarity  with Cake, Codeigniter and PHP WAX). I do wonder if he shouldn’t have mentioned its reputation for being config-file-city early on, as that was one of the things that stuck with me watching the demo. That and a slight concern at its generating of Javascript. Needless to say I’ll be adding it to my list of things to experiment with… Right behind IE 8 and the iPhone SDK.

We finished off with a quick pint and general pub chat.

The PHPWM guys seem a friendly bunch (and provided pizza and crisps!) I narrowly avoided purchasing a cuddly elePHPant, which my wife is no doubt happy about, as we have enough tat already.

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Saturday, November 10th, 2007

So today we’re taking a good hard look at the Multipack website and doing some serious redesign work. We’re at the funky Custard Factory offices of One Black Bear.

So far we’ve mainlined coffee. It’s too early to be thinking on a Saturday.

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Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

I’ll probably write some more coherant thoughts later, but suffice to say I think this year’s @media was pretty good. I enjoy it as a chance to meet like minds and discuss ideas, this year I found myself really grooving on the presentations too. Possibly it’s ideally pitched at my eclectic skillset.

On the design side, I really enjoyed Jon Hick’s Creative Sponge talk, which was a great summary of pulling together diverse inspirational elements and a nice insight on his creative process. Jason Santa Maria’s Devilish Details talk was a great look at core design principles. Mark Boulton’s Typography presentation was a look at type through a martial arts lense.

Over in the development world Dan Webb’s Javascript talk included a few nice details (including one very tasty testing and debugging tool) and Nate Koechley did a sterling job on high performance sites.

I got to catch up with a few folks. Special shoutout to Simon Mackie, one of my old colleagues from glasshaus who was over here representing Sitepoint (and who provided me with an elegant orange T-Shirt).

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