WD06 - Day 1 Musings

Well, Day 1 has been and gone. Well technically it's more like Day -2, as there are two days of workshops before the conference proper.

For me, it was DOM Scripting with Jeremy Keith, and while I own his book, and have built a number of Ajax apps in the past, it was nice to learn the proper, bullet-proof way to go about things. I was a little worried at the start of the workshop when he went over the history of Javascript and introduced the terminology, which I was already quite familiar with, but by about 11am, Jeremy got into full-swing, throwing us into some nicely formed code. He's a clever chappy, explains things very clearly and is a top bloke to boot.

Some observations from the conference so far:

• It may be surprising to people who know me, but in this environment, I'm quite shy. It's difficult for me to join in a conversation or just go up to someone and start talking. I'll perservere, as I'm determined to beer-on with top bunch of folk at some time this week.
• The stereotype of thin, funky, fashionable, web designers is not necessarily the reality. It's definately an IT crowd. (I was almost worried that my lack of facial hair/Threadless T-shirts would be a problem :)

I'm currently half-way through my second day of workshops, which is the Iterative App, with Kelly Goto. It seems a bit differnet than I'd expected, so hopefully I'll still be able to take something away from the workshop. Regardless, I'll muse on the day a little later on tonight.