Saturday, May 17th, 2008
It would be remiss of me not to point all web design and development folks from the UK at the Geek in the Park 2008 site. Held in Leamington Spa on Satruday 9th August, and organised by the Multipack (most of the work by Trev and Lloydyweb ).
The event, last run in 2006, is a two part affair. In the afternoon there’s a picnic and general social, bring tea, cake, sandwiches, jam and your family. The evening is a talk on professional web design and development topics. Last time, Bruce and Patrick talked about Pragmatic Accessibility. This year, well, I know who’s been contacted, but it’s not confirmed so I’m keeping stum.
Posted in thoughts | 4 Comments on Geek in the Park 2008 - The Return
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Five years ago glasshaus went the way of the dodo. I swear it seems like it was yesterday… I was working there as a technical editor at the time, a diversion from web development following a dot-com redundancy. I was hoping publishing would be more stable. Somewhat ironic, considering.
It was a great job. It’d flown me to the USA for Web Design World ‘02 and shoved me into the deep end with standards (hey, you can’t edit folks work without knowing the subject inside out). I was working with great folks like Chris, Bruce and Simon and helping edit great books.
To say it had an impact would be an understatement. It left me with an abiding passion for web standards and accessibility in particular. I was gutted when in came to an end.
Five years on standards and usability are more the norm than ever before. It’s easier to learn the right ways straight off. Looking at the state of web development today there’s a seam of glasshaus running through it. Hell, I remember a meeting where we decided to start using the term Web Professional for our audience, and that seems to have stuck.
Posted in thoughts | 13 Comments on Is it really five years since glasshaus?
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.
Posted in meetup, thoughts | 1 Comment so far on PHP West Midlands and Symfony
