The first WSG London meetup happened on Friday and judging by the comments people made afterwards was a tremendous success.
The Presentations
Andy Budd gave a thought-provoking talk about what standards are really about by first talking about the history of the screw to then talk about (in terms of web development) why we don’t necessarily need to worry about them. He also made some good points about the need for developers move on and address new issues now that web standards is seeing wider adoption.
Christian’s presentation was thoroughly entertaining and he had the audience in stitches. After introducing himseld to the audience he then went on to give some good reasons why we should make our javascript more maintainable and some practical advice on how we could achieve this. Christian’s slides are available here.
After the presentations and packing up the AV gear, we went on down to the Printworks in Clerkenwell to announce the results of the competition. We asked three questions which attendees had to answer on the back of the postcard provided.
The Competition
The three questions were as follows:
- If there were a “Beginning JavaScript the Musical”, who would you cast and why?
- If you had the power to make a popular script/trick undone and never invented, which one would it be and why?
- What is the most obscure code you ever had to debug?
The crowning glory of the answers was Mat Ryer’s following answer to question 1.
One thing you notice about JavaScript is the use of semi-colons. I’d cast my friend Richard in the lead role because he had an operation when he was younger and now he only has a semi-colon.
Plenty of people took the time to come up and say thanks for organising the event and that they are looking forward to the next one, which was something that I really appreciated. It was great to chat to everyone as well as drink one or two well earnt guinesses.
Without these people this would never had happened
Thanks to all of the attendee’s for coming and showing your support.
Thanks to both Andy Budd and Christian Heilmann for agreeing to be the first presenters for the first London WSG meetup. Both did an excellent job with their presentations.
Chris Mills and Friends of ED for supplying the books for the prizes.
Thanks to Laurence Frewer of Presenta who provided the podcast recording.
Thanks to Andy Hume and Tim Huegdon for helping out on the door and doing their best to try and get the audience to use the mics for the questions.
Last but not least thanks to the Web Standards Group and Russ Weakly for inspiring me to put this whole thing together out of jealousy of the Australian based WSG events.
The Podcasts
The podcasts are now online. Please subscribe to the feed using you favorite podcasting application. WSG London Meetup 14/07/06 Podcast.