Earlier today I went to Whisky Web.
I went down on the train on the morning so missed the opening keynote (sad face) as I only got to venue at 9:45. But here's a quick round up of the talks I saw: Open street mapDerick Rethans I loved the obvious passion for the subject matter, and totally want to organise a Refresh Aberdeen mapping party in the summer. Maybe map everything at Balmedie before the BBQ?. I've also doodled out half a dozen things I need to investigate on OSM. You can't ask for more from a talk. Great stuff. Essential Node.js
Mike Amundsen I've played with node.js a bit, I like it. It's nice. I got a fair bit out of this talk. A reminder of the reason node exists, some tips on using it, and some reassurance that I'm doing alright with express and socket.io in my project. JS is fun. Mike was probably the most polished speaker. The emperor's new clothes
Kevinjohn Gallagher This wasn't my cup of tea. I can live without argumentative Zeldman bashing, boobies on slides, and endless innuendo laden star trek jokes. Sorry man – maybe caught you on a bad day. Mashing Up JavaScript
Bastian Hofmann I found this one a little frustrating. Great content, fired through at lightening pace, with huge enthusiasm. Jumping from presentation to editor to terminal to browser was hard to keep a handle on though – making it feel really disjointed. That said, I've also filled a couple of pages with js stuff to try out around ideas from the talk. So with a bit less jumping around this would be a great talk. Or a really good day long workshop. Is your App ready for the cloud
Thijs Feryn I really don't look after any apps that need the level of hosting that Thijs gets excited about. I enjoyed the talk though – interesting issues and knowledgeable speaker. I want to find out more about the MS cloud offerings just out of interest. How the Web evolves with Hypermedia
David Zülke Loved it. Keynotes should present a world view. We saw a world view. And a shark. Have some code to change next week off the back of this. Great fun, thoughtful stuff.
Overall
For a conference pulled together at such short notice it had a great atmosphere, some good talks, and tasty vegetarian lasagne. Well done guys. As I type this (sitting on my train north drinking a cold Nero triple latte) everyone else is getting a whisky master class from @whiskycraig. Bad timing of the last train home – Craig is the man! 😦 I don't know how everyone else felt about the ticket price. Personally, £50 for a full day catered conf with sharks and malt whisky at a proper venue seems cheap. Juozas said in the closing remarks that they hope to bring it back next year, you should all get a ticket.
Steven Milne 