May
28
Kings of Code, quick recap
Filed Under Tech, WebDev | 2 Comments
Attended Kings of Code yesterday. Awesome conference for web devs, just a quick recap:
- PPK is great speaker, did his bit on javascript event handling, most of which was news to me. Some jabs at W3C and surprising praise for Microsoft (that is, for the 1% of things they do get right). Big revelation: PPK was the only guy in the room who doesn’t use Firebug. (slides of his talk)
- Folke Lemaitre gave us a great insight into how Netlog was made to scale, especially interesting was how they used memcache. Big surprise: despite having many more users and using the same technology, Netlog uses a lot less servers than Hyves. Several Hyves dudes in the room btw…. (slides)
- Mark Birbeck walked us through the new W3C standards for the semantic web, RDFA, XForms etc. Interesting, but not really riveting stuff.
- Nate Abele didn’t make himself any new friends by dissing Rails, Symfony et all, mostly for the wrong reasons. But it was good to know many of the attending coders were more professional. Somebody might have to explain to him most pro-PHP coders would rather use real RoR than CakePHP’s php4 imitation of Rails. Too bad, with the right input Cake could be going places, ’cause there is plenty of room for something other then Zend’s pick-and-choose approach and Symfony’s enterprisy framework.
- Nate Koechley did his bit about front-end performance tuning. Little news to me, but an excellent and very convincing presentation. YSlow rules! There was a rush for Yahoo stickers at the end, yes, we’re still amongst geeks here.
- The Open Source pitches were fun. Roomware already had it’s fanclub in the room, Bert managed to squeeze GIT into 5 minutes and still be convincing, Simon made an excellent case for oAuth (gotta check out oAuthernoon). Ruben was less convincing with Javeline (probably the wrong audience), and Tinco was too badly prepared and nervous to make the case for Rails. Should have stuck to Phusion, which could become a breakthrough project for Rails.
- Menno van Slooten from eBuddy made a smooth presentation about the growing professionalization of front-end development. Cool bit about the MySpace cross-site scripting worm.
- John Resig did a very thorough presentation of the big javascript frameworks JQuery (of course), Dojo, Prototype an YUI. Really helpful to me, but I got the feeling a lot of the front-enders would have preferred to hear him go into the technical details of JQuery.
Other stuff:
- WiFi was excellent most of the time.
- Backchannel was funny but kinda useless for one day, single track conference.
- Few people bothered to bag a free eBuddy mug.
- Total sausage fest, 4, 5 women tops. Maybe add some Flash and a female speaker next time?
- Looks like the PHPGG is gonna come out of hibernation. Nice.
- Everything went very smoothly and on schedule for a first time conference. Guess the experience of the NextWeb dudes helps.
- The conference room could seriously use some airco.
- After the drinks at Club 11 we organized an impromptu geekdinner with about 25 dudes from Hyves, Mediamonks, Lost Boys ao.
Thanks to Sander for putting an great event together!
(Sorry for the messy incoherent post, I just wanted to write this down while it’s still fresh. It’s not like I’m trying to write War and Peace here…)
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Nice bitz
