Some Thoughts on Good Conferences to Attend - UK

Jul 31, 2007 · 3 minute read

Ben Metcalfe just posted a run down of some thoughts on conferences to attend. With all my travels this year I thought I’d join in.

I’ve spend quite a bit of time this year travelling the UK for various get togethers, conferences, meetups and the like and had great fun doing so. I go mainly because nowhere else do I find quite such a critical mass of smart interesting people to have a pint with and discuss the intricacies of the web. For 2007, in roughly chronological order: WebDD, Barcamp London, Future of Web Apps, Highland Fling, Refresh Edinburgh, @media, Hackday. I’ll be at dConstruct, Future of Web Apps (again) and possibly Future of Mobile and a Rails meetup in London as well to finish off the year.

I won’t go on about how cool Barcamp was. I actually think the whole unconference thing sits alongside the more formal conference scene quite nicely rather than acting as a direct challenge. Safe to say if you have yet to make a Barcamp then be on the lookout (although if you could not pick brighton please. I really want to go and it’s going to be hard enough to get tickets anyway!)

Highland Fling was excellent. Alan did a bang up job of picking a pretty focused topic and getting a gang of safe hands in to do the talking. Everything seemed to follow on from the previous talk, or catch a thread only touched on earlier in the day. This turned out to be down to the specific topic rather than some pre-conference collusion which I thing bodes well for other such topic centric mini-conferences. It was all rounded off (as all conferences must be) with a rousing talk from Andy Clarke and a panel chaired by Jeremy Paxman Keith.

media is still the daddy of the UK web standards scene. Personally I want more advanced materials and I'd love to see more audience interaction, but the scale of it makes that a little difficult I acknowledge. I'll keep going as long as I learn something new and come away feeling a little bit inspired. I'll be going next year. Maybe it's not going to hit the heights of the very firstmedia a couple of years back but that was my first trip out into the world. Oh, and patrick throws good parties in pubs with beer.

I think dConstruct is basically a grown up Highland Fling. It was great fun last year so here’s hoping it’s as much fun this year. Again, the idea of a particular topic is in place. I’m still thinking about @media Ajax if I can get enough work together to pay for it (note to people trying to keep up - I now work for myself as a freelancer) and I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll want to get along to Future of Mobile in a couple of months too.

My plan for next year is to try and get out of the country and hopefully to some of the events in the US and Europe that offer something different. SXSW is an obvious choice, but I’d be interested in any other ideas on top of Ben’s list. I’d also like to think in a year of so I might even end up talking at some nice event or other - but I need to pick a topic and stick to it I reckon instead of flitting between whatever I feel like that afternoon. Oh and probably practice.