February 1 2008

Highlights from Web Directions North ’08

Web Directions North logo.The Web Directions North conference 08 has wrapped up, a great success. I went to some provoking sessions, including Douglas Crockford’s on how Javascript is so inherently insecure it should be replaced, and Josh Williams’ on growing a small company by capitalizing on a niche.

That said, the most compelling part of conferences is being able to chat with people in the industry. They recognized this and there were various opportunities to do so (a party at the end of each day). I managed to talk with most of the presenters, which was intimidating at first but was incredibly worthwhile. Some of the most interesting conversations I had were with:

  • Dave Shea about using Rogers’ data plans with his iPhone
  • Alex Capehart about VPS and support from a hosting provider’s perspective
  • Boris Mann on how if you want to charge a low consulting rate while starting out, you should call it a new customer discount.
  • Jeffrey Zeldman about comment spam on A List Apart
  • Jonathan Snook on the differences between the major javascript frameworks

All in all, well worth attending.

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5 Comments

  1. Allen
    Feb 3 2008
    10:24 am

    A few more highlights:

    • Daniel Burka of Digg presenting on how they’ve iterated over the Digg UI and where their successes and mistakes were
    • Andy Clarke putting a huge Internet Explorer sticker on an Opera guy’s back when he wasn’t looking
    • Listening to what everyone has to say about Expression Engine vs. Drupal
    • Boris Mann telling Andrew Kumar to “Step it up, biotch” because he didn’t have a blog or business cards.
    • The occasional passionate conversation about IE’s new Version Targeting debacle, sometimes involving IE developers

  2. Andrew Kumar
    Feb 3 2008
    5:12 pm

    Okay so I don’t have a full fledged blog quite yet. I have a smaller academic musings posting at http://www.sfu.ca/~kumar however…

    Dude I got Zeldman to sign my shirt… how AWESOME! hehe

  3. Allen
    Feb 4 2008
    1:14 am

    Yes, that was awesome. He said it’s the first time it ever happened.

    Hm… your “musings” page doesn’t have comments, but I guess it’s technically a blog. I don’t think Boris will let up yet though.

  4. Andrew Kumar
    Feb 19 2008
    12:02 am

    Hey I have comments now… can I call it a blog yet?

  5. Allen
    Feb 19 2008
    1:33 am

    Yes!

What do you think?