Comments: Add yours

1. On July 17th, 2006 at 4:41 am Russ Weakley said:

Congratulations, Stuart, on what was obviously a great night. Heres to many more!

2. On July 17th, 2006 at 9:24 am Frances Berriman said:

Thanks for organising Stuart. I really enjoyed it! Looking forward to the next one.

3. On July 17th, 2006 at 9:48 am Peter Gasston said:

I really enjoyed the presentations, but the meetup after was less successful. The bar was exceptionally noisy and after struggling to hear or be heard, I decided to leave.

It would be great if we could find a place more like a bar and less like a club next time.

4. On July 17th, 2006 at 10:15 am David Singleton said:

I really enjoyed it, thanks for organising it, looking forward to more!

5. On July 17th, 2006 at 10:20 am Nick Toye said:

I enjoyed the second one more than the first, I thought the history of the screw could have been summed up in 5 mins or less and then more css could have been talked about. As I went there for the 1st presentation, I was disappointed, but also suprised because I enjoyed the second one.

6. On July 17th, 2006 at 11:50 am Stuart Colville said:

@Russ: Thanks Russ, I’m sure there will be many more.

@Frances and David: I’m really glad you enjoyed it thanks!

@Peter: I understand your frustration with the venue. I visited the venue on a much quieter wednesday night and so didn’t realise that it would be so noisy on a Friday. But be sure I have learnt a lot from this event and there’s many things I will be improving upon for the next event. However overall I think this was a positive start for the future of WSG events to be held done in London so I do hope you’ll come to future events.

@Nick: The main thing for me is that you got something out of it. It’s always going to be hard to cover all the bases for everyone attending but I am going to try hard to find a balance between topics so that it will be useful to both seasoned developers but also pique the interest of people new to web standards.

7. On July 17th, 2006 at 11:58 am Nick Wade said:

Thanks Stuart – it was good fun. Admittedly I didn’t understand half the lecture, but it did remind me of very similar meet-ups years ago, where instead everyone was raving about flash and graphic design. Principles remain identical: keep our industry exclusive, kick out the cowboys, and buy my book! All very good business

8. On July 17th, 2006 at 12:33 pm trovster said:

It was well organised, except I thought the after-presentation venue suffered from the same problems as the @media 2006 after event party, too loud ‘background’ music. Although, it wasn’t set completely aside like @media2006, so I realise this is difficult to control.

Some friends and I are getting frustrated with the amount of these meetups taking place in the capital, the bottom end of the country which is fine for London-based and below companies, but not ideal for people north of Oxford! Again, not your fault.

I liked the presentations, and it was nice to go to an event which isn’t preaching to the converted. Since @media I think the message has got through.

Looking forward to the next one.

9. On July 17th, 2006 at 3:04 pm BenA said:

I was really excited about the chance to go to the first WSG London meeting however I feel the conference fell well short of my personal expectations (not to mention the hopes of the development team accompanying me).

I hoped to take with me a bit more than an extensive, perhaps excessive, “history of the screw”. When I write presentations I try to think about the attention span of my audience and a good rule of thumb is “keep things succinct”. Andy took upon a difficult argument and I applaud him for having the nerve to get up and talk about something that needs to be talked about i.e. the need for web professionals to consider more than just standards when building websites however I would have to offer the following bits of advice:
* if you can make your point in 1 slide instead of 7 – do so i.e. the history of the screw
* do not ever say after a presentation “I do not believe everything that I just said”. It makes the audience think “if you don’t believe it why should I?” and it just feels very unprofessional

The second talk was good. The pace was good, it was engaging and it was entertaining but I could not help but feel the lecture could well have been entitled “How to write good code”. I agreed with the comment made immediately after the talk which suggested the talk just covered some basic concepts which could be applied to any other scripting language and, in some cases, any other computer language.

I think that future meetings should have guidelines such as “Who should be attending this meeting”. This would help marry the expectations of both the audience and the speaker. For example if you want to discuss basics then you want to talk to people who have very little knowledge on web standards but if you want to discuss advanced subjects, discuss coding approaches etc. you want to talk people who will understand the subject matter.

Good luck going forward.

10. On July 17th, 2006 at 3:49 pm Stuart Colville said:

@BenA: Thanks for your feedback, you raise some interesting points.

The hardest point of doing this is getting the balance right, and I would like to avoid a situation where I’m only running events for novices or vice versa.

Ideally the prospective attendees should discern whether to see the presentations or not based on the details of each talk. Although the description of each presentation on the meetup site was quite detailed, I can see the need to do more to qualify the level of each presentation and make that clearer for future events, so I appreciate you pointing that out.

11. On July 17th, 2006 at 3:59 pm Chris Heilmann said:

@BenA: The problem is that this is a meetup, not a workshop. I’d have loved to go into details and more examples but, effectively, we knew nothing about the audience and their likes and level of subject knowledge.

While you are right that it was a “good coding practices” talk the main point I tried to get across is that sadly enough and because of the heritage of bad rushed code this is not common practice with JavaScript as the easy learning curve and the immediate execution in a browser makes it tempting just to hack some lines together.

Well, maybe I screwed up, delivered a non-rivetting talk and need to add some more nuts and bolts to it next time.

12. On July 17th, 2006 at 4:46 pm Richard Conyard said:

– Sorry pearoast since more appropriate here –
Thanks for all the time and effort that went into the event, it was a good turn out, the presentations were thought provoking and the drinking (ouch – and damn the early times of the last trains back!).

I must say though whilst I agree with the premise of Andys’ presentation that we must get a grip over standards and realise there is room for ivory snow, I can’t agree that the “battle” has been won.

The reason for this is that it’s not that clients do not care about web standards (there are enough tick boxes on ITTs to show that it’s often a consideration), rather it’s clients and for companies choosing in-house HR that cannot tell between companies/candidates that do and do not work with standards. The web standards “battle” will not be won until there is a easy way for those that shouldn’t have to care about standards (clients), being able to tell apart companies/developers that do and do not adhere to them, or there is universal professional adoption.

@BenA: The comment immediately afterwards was mine, but I don’t feel that the point of the presentation was wasted (perhaps my point came across wrong), more that JS is treated by a majority of designers as something of a slap dash to achieve some flashy functionality without consideration of what it’s really doing. The point I was trying to make is that like any other programming language when using JS designers etc. should plan, code it properly etc. not just grab the nearest script from dynadrive or wherever.

13. On July 17th, 2006 at 5:14 pm Andy Hawkes said:

Cheers for an enjoyable event – I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with a “web celeb” in the form of Mr Budd despite my bitter cynicism and cruel black heart.

I found it entertaining although not particularly informative, but I that’s more to do with my level of experience than the information and ideas put forth by Andy and Chris.

As others have said, the volume level in the pub afterwards was a bit high, but it did give me the chance to rant noisily under the influence of strong ale to those unfortunate enough to be unable to politely escape.

All in all, I’m looking forward to future meetings.

14. On July 17th, 2006 at 6:18 pm Clive Walker said:

Thanks for organising the meet-up. I enjoyed both talks although I’d concur with the other opinions about the pub afterwards. AB’s talk was the most interesting for me but I’d probably not entirely agree with AB that the ‘war’ is won. At least, not based on some recent websites I have seen!

I think it’s important at these events not to be ‘web standards snobs’ and I thought the meeting achieved this. Looking forward to next meeting.

15. On July 17th, 2006 at 6:35 pm Cola said:

I really enjoyed the talks on Friday. Stuart – you did really well organising this and I hope there’ll be many more to come. Reading a few of the comments, I think we should all remember that the WSG meet-ups are not workshops (as Chris also said). What they do offer though is a great forum for sharing knowledge and encouraging discussion and debate. We got to hear Chris and Andy’s views (on two very current issues) for a bargain-bin price of 450p, which I believe is the average price of a pint in the posher parts of London Village, and not something to be knocked

16. On July 18th, 2006 at 9:23 am Adam said:

I think the event was an excellent sucess and whilst I can see some people pts about the talks I think it’s very tough to work out exactly who will be at an event like that.

Whilst I felt very much on the page with Andy’s talk already the way he explained standards benefits (the real ones) will certainly be useful for how I push them to clients

Night out wise it was great to meet a so many people and whilst it was a little loud certainly later on this became less of an issue.

@trovster & any other northerners: I’m thinking abouyt trying to setup something like this in either Lancaster or Manchester depending on interest.

17. On July 18th, 2006 at 11:28 am Alex Dodig said:

I really would like to see one of these happenings / meetings in The Netherlands (or Belgium), instead of GB (for a change!)

18. On July 18th, 2006 at 12:01 pm Stuart Colville said:

@Alex: Well if you want that, why not start your own WSG event in Holland or Belgium then

19. On July 18th, 2006 at 12:22 pm Richard said:

Thanks for making this happen, Stuart. I had a great time and it was clearly a huge success. Bring on the next one, I say.

20. On July 18th, 2006 at 1:37 pm frank said:

Would there be a meeting in September?

21. On July 18th, 2006 at 1:43 pm Stuart Colville said:

@Richard, Andy, Clive, Cola and Adam: I’m glad you all enjoyed it thanks for showing your appreciation.

@Frank: I’ll be looking to probably set the next one up for November. This is due to two things. September there will be d.Construct and in addition I’m not around for 2 weeks at the beginning. Also If the 2nd event is in November that will set everything up much better for doing everything every two months from then on. This is very much up in the air at the moment but I will announce as soon as I have a definite date.

22. On July 18th, 2006 at 2:21 pm Mr Bootle said:

Stuart, an additional pat on the back for organising this event. Look forward to the next one!

I agree with most of the posts, AB talk fell a little short for me and it wasn’t until he started talking about pushing ’standards’ in other areas, accessibility, usability etc that I was wishing his talk would continue. Let me be so bold to suggest that these topics would be good to follow up at the meeting.

As a web standards designer finally plunging into the deepest recesses of DOM Scripting I really enjoyed Christian’s hillarious presentation and am looking forward to listening to the pod cast for all the bits that didn’t stick. Cheers

23. On July 18th, 2006 at 3:02 pm Caz Mockett said:

I’d like to add my thanks for you organising the event, Stuart. I went along to hear Andy but also really enjoyed Christian’s session – he made JavaScript sound fun, for heavens’ sake!! He’s inspired me to get to grips with some DOM scripting rather than just cowering in the corner at the thought of it

I’m looking forward to the next event,