@media 2006

Drew and I got back from media 2006 late this afternoon, and it really has been a fantastic few days. The conference for me started with a speakers dinner on Wednesday night, I've not attended SXSW, nor last year's media and so this was the first time I’d met most of the attendees ‘in real life’ despite having spoken to many of them online. I spent most of the speakers dinner feeling slightly shellshocked, however everyone was exactly as I’d imagined and I had great fun despite having to rush off early to pick up the Small Person.

The speakers and panels over the two days have been great and really interesting. One of the reasons I’ve tended not to go to conferences has been that they are often quite designer focussed. @media had a great balance of designer and developer topics, Tantek’s talk on Microformats being particularly interesting and the JavaScript Libraries: Friend or Foe? panel very funny as well as a good discussion on the various libraries and their pros and cons.

Day two saw me making an unusual foray into public speaking as I was on the Strategic CSS Project Management panel along with Roger Johansson and Dave Shea. Dave is probably the best person in the world to end up on a panel with, as he is a complete pro when it comes to speaking and presenting and ensured that the panel ran smoothly. I was convinced that when the time came to introduce myself I’d be completely unable to speak, but after that point it was actually really enjoyable. The feedback and questions during the panel and afterwards at the social events was good, and I’ve had so many really interesting conversations with people about the issues that we face when managing CSS in a large project, or where multiple developers are involved. I felt that all of us involved in that panel felt that this issue of CSS management was something that needs to be explored further, and based on the feedback I think that a lot of people are struggling with how to do this.

The whole event was really well run – including the social events in the evening and today. Probably the only negative was the fact that the wifi within the centre was appalling and so, as people have already commented, those attending found it hard to blog about what was happening during the event for those unable to attend. I’ve uploaded some photos to Flickr, check out the atmedia tag for more.