I guess the #IdeasOfMarch came around at just the right time as I’m at that awkward point where I’m waiting for client signoff and approval for 3 projects, I have little to do but wait and “catch up” with what I’ve missed in the last week where I didn’t have WiFi and data roaming (at £3.07/mb that was disabled immediately!) to the net.

Ideas Of March perhaps isn’t intended to provide too much motivation for me but while I do blog regularly it’s often sporadic and I get on a bit of a run of posts where I just throw my thoughts onto the page then don’t post again for a week or two.

However, I’ve come back and my mind is blank. Completely blank. However, I like blogging and the lean weeks only serve to make the productive ones more rewarding and enjoyable. My main reason for writing is that it acts as a brain dump in many ways. Things I want to say but that don’t fit on Twitter or on other sites. My thoughts on my site.

I didn’t realise how much I needed a break that was actually relaxing. My last holiday away was over a year ago and a combination of terrible 2′s toddler behaviour and 30°C Spanish heat, I came back more frazzled than when I went.

This time was different. As a family we had a great time, the holiday company delivered what is possibly the best demonstration of doing the simple things right I’ve ever seen (as a result, a great experience) so the return to the coalface is perhaps a little underwhelming and I actually feel a bit angry at myself that I’m still reading the same stuff I was a few weeks back as if the holiday is already a distant memory. I think I’m probably going to take the opportunity to do some housekeeping of Twitter follows and reading subscriptions while I’m at it.

The catching up bit really didn’t take long this time. I realised for the most part I don’t care any more. I’ve been totally immersed digesting the opinions of hundreds of designers and developers and while I’m careful to make up my own mind about things, the web community sometimes feels like you have thousands of voices competing for your attention.

Dribbble shots, Tweets, Blog Posts, “In case you missed it yesterday” messages and so much more. My mind had switched all that off last week and enjoyed a Homer Simpson like week of peace and quiet of the brain. Ideas of March is just the tonic I need to ease back into posting.

The post holiday blues – You can go away now, I’m back on the proverbial horse and normal service will be resumed.

Related posts:

1. Why you should kill good ideas as well

Layout tools

• PXtoEM – A very useful calculator for converting px layout sizing to ems.
• Scaling with EM’s – A good blog post and demo explaining how you can use em’s to scale your site
• Responsive layouts, responsively wireframed – A good demo of responsive wireframes

Testing tools

• Quick responsive tester – Chris Armstrong’s tool for quickly resizing your site in browser
• The responsinator – Another quick tool to see how your site looks at a range of different sizes
• Responsive.is – Yep, another …
• Media Query Bookmarklet – It’s exactly that
• Resizer – A bookmarklet that lets you set window sizes for quick testing
• Solidify app – A tool from Zurb for building clickable prototypes
• Blaze Mobitest – Awesome tool for testing the speed and weight of your site

Useful blog posts

• Cutting the mustard – A clever proposal for browser testing support
• Responsive navigation patterns – Brad Frost’s useful review of common techniques for navigation along with pros and cons for each
• Responsive navigation – A quick freebie I made for your use

Related posts:

1. A simple responsive navigation
2. Responsive development resources
3. Some more responsive resources

I stopped freelancing full time when I joined my good friend @peteduncanson here at Offroadcode and while I take on the occasional freelance project, I’m a 9-5 kind of a guy these days. I do like to post from time to time sharing my experiences from when I was a freelancer (I hope I don’t sound like an old dad) back in the day … and after reading Anthony Kileen’s post and tweets about payment terms I figured with hindsight and a couple of extra years in the industry there are things I’d do differently now if I did go back to freelancing. A few people asked what they were so without further rambling.

I’d sub contract much much more

I was happy a few years back that I filled a requirement that I used to refer to as “front end designer” which covered everything from the initial meeting/briefing with clients, working up visuals (none of this designing in browser, responsive jazz a few years back) and building HTML & CSS templates along with WordPress work (themes). I never felt comfortable billing clients for hacking bits of scripts together to get some sort of Frankenstein monster functionality. If I couldn’t actually understand and do it, I didn’t do it.

There was good demand for those skills but the market is much more involved these days, requirements and deliverables are more complex and varied and this means you either need to be extremely specialist (CSS writing master only?) or you need to team up with one or more people to fill in the gaps in your skillset and vice versa. I wasn’t active on Twitter a few years ago, so options were a bit more limited in some ways but now I talk to a huge range of people I’d happily team up with and manage on projects where I didn’t have the full skills needed to deliver.

I’d get some office space

I never had self discipline issues when I worked from home, I’d be showered and ready to sit down at 9am like everyone else in an office. However, the arrival of my son made working from home difficult even when the wife was looking after him, it’s difficult not to be distracted when you hear crying etc. Space at a local media centre or sharing an office with another freelancer/agency would be high on my list.

I’d consider invoice factoring

This is something I nearly opted for and it’s something I’d strongly consider again. One of the biggest problems with freelancing is cashflow. It’s a never ending cycle of stress wondering when an invoice will get paid and of course each time you chase payment, you’re losing time when you could be doing something else you can bill for.

Invoice Factoring is a service where you sell your invoice to a 3rd party who collect payment for you. Effectively they pay you immediately but you get less than the value of your invoice. You get the security of cashflow but I am aware that you often need to meet some minimum requirements for turnover. Also, if you’re going to do this, make sure your clients are aware before a company call them asking for payments.

A few resources

For the most part, this is a short list because in 3 years full time freelancing, I collected 100% of the value of my invoices and only had a couple of late payments and while there were a few hiccups and disagreements there were no clients I parted company with before a project was done. I figure I was probably on the right course and common sense will steer you 95% of the way anyway.

If you need some sample docs (contract/invoice/business plans etc) then please visit and contribute to Docpool.co and while I’m no guru I try to share my thoughts and experiences and I’m happy to answer questions if you mail me.

Related posts:

1. Common questions when starting freelancing
2. Freelancing and dealing with taxes
3. Shaking things up doesn’t hurt

Those same folks who many thousands follow and praise on Twitter, or whos blogs are retweeted as wonderous glimpses of knowledge and insight. How did this friendly and potentially helpful idea go down so badly among so many?

Things I learnt on Twitter yesterday

1. I’ve said before Twitter is a truly truly diabolical means for communicating information and sound bites from conferences and events. I haven’t changed my mind in the slightest – don’t do it.
2. Even with good intentions (they certainly are/were), telling people outright you’re going forming a panel to help solve their problems seems to be akin to waving a red flag in front of a really angry bull.
3. If you do want to tweet sound bites from a conference or meetup, don’t bother.

Did it miss the mark?

They probably slightly misjudged the name of their meetup but that’s it! Hell hath no fury like a Twitter hashtag.

Beyond that, it all sounded like a nice initiative and idea. I talk to a few of these guys on Twitter and the ones I do know, I respect their skill, work and backgrounds but unfortunately I bet for a simple change in wording and tone, this good idea wouldn’t have gone down like the Hindenburg with many. Here’s what a “summit” is listed as on Wikipedia so it’s not hard to see why many got their backs up so quickly.

A summit meeting (or summit) is a meeting of heads of state or government, usually with considerable media exposure, tight security and a prearranged agenda. Wikipedia

For a simple matter of wording and branding, the elitist tone that it appears wound up so many could have been avoided. There’s a reminder about the power of wording for you.

Good things

I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of this meetup as the aim of it was that questions were welcomed and fired into the pot from members of the community who wanted to so it’d be interesting to see how much was covered in the end and what the write ups will contain in terms of solid guidance for those who want it.

I believe this was a sponsored event of some sort and I’d love to see this kind of thing hitting the road with different faces and perhaps the attendees picked from a list of people who want to attend and are able to contribute based on experiences so far? Still, it’s a shame such meets are so often viewed as having a different agenda to the helping and sharing outlined in this one. I’d certainly love to be involved in a similar discussion if one is organised in Leeds or Manchester.

Blog more – and deliver

One of the main things I notice with responsive design these days is that it’s absolutely everywhere, everyone is clamouring to be a leading name and give an opinion on technique. It’s like the Wild West Web at the moment in that respect. It’s great though because the sensible designers and developers are the ones who are for the most part assimilating the knowledge and evaluating its use and practicality and making their own strides.

A tweet I did notice from Responsive Summit talked about everyone blogging more. I’d love to see more write-ups taking place of how projects were done and what decisions guided design and development.

Too many people (me included) are guilty of discussing process to the nth degree and what we should and shouldn’t do and forgetting it’s a business where shipping a product is a pretty vital end result too.

I’ve only seen a couple of write ups in the last year explaining technical decisions and processes on an actual, launched product/site. Perhaps if there were more examples of technical reviews post launch (I appreciate not all clients allow posting of technical details) and more articles like “Responsive images – How they almost worked and what we need” we’d move forward more than if we decide whether there’s a “right way to design“.

Related posts:

1. Rush, judge, rethink – A thank you to Mark Boulton

Sarah Parmenter posted about how she can’t design in the browser and it seems to be a “problem” (It’s not a problem) many others experience. I’ve revised my own workflow a great deal over the last year and I do a huge amount of work in the browser and on any scraps of paper I can find but do you know what? For the most part, Fireworks (insert Photoshop if that’s your tool of choice) is still open all day for me and the last freelance project I did included me sending a full set of jpg visuals to the client among other resources.

For the most part, I don’t care what other people say is best practice or what I should do. I do what is best for me, my client and their end users and at work, whatever is the best way for us all to contribute and tweak. It depends on the nature of the project, what the client needs* and quite simply – whatever works best!

My typical design workflow

Unlike Sarah, I do design primarily in the browser these days. My process is pretty simple for the most part:

1. Sketch out initial wireframes and visual ideas
2. Create wireframes in Balsamiq
3. Sketch out HTML structure of project on paper
4. Start building HTML structure
5. Add in CSS
6. Test
7. Release

Now at this point, you’ll be wondering where I do any actual design. The secret is for the most part, design in Fireworks (yes, or Photoshop) can fit into or between any stage above. As I mentioned above, the last freelance project I took on, I was paid only to deliver wireframes and a new visual look and feel for an existing website that the clients own team were going to rebuild in HTML & CSS and update their own CMS at the same time.

A client case for modifying my workflow

Designing in the browser wasn’t entirely practical in this case. So I didn’t. In that particular case my workflow was modified to something like this:

1. Sketch out initial wireframes and visual ideas
2. Create wireframes in Balsamiq (send for approval)
3. Overlay design elements in Fireworks

I did a lot of groundwork with the client to ensure they knew that because they weren’t paying me to build the site, there is only so much that can be done when you’re a smaller part of a bigger process. My aim from the beginning was to take a site that had last been visually updated in 2004 and give it a new lease of life while also accounting for varying screen sizes when it’s built. In a dream world, you’d manage the whole process but sometimes you can’t and you therefore have to be pragmatic.

I sent jpgs for my last project

What I provided this particular client with was a set of wireframes that showed the basics of a responsive layout – a “small screen view” of how the content, navigation etc would flow and a “big screen view” which typically represents a desktop view. On each wireframe, I made notes for their development team on how things would alter and I provided a series of suggested breakpoints for their build. Another reason for doing this was also down to the fact I actually didn’t know when this project was scheduled to be built so I accounted for the two significant breakpoints in layout that were known at the moment – a 320px wide “mobile view” and I decided on a 960px maximum width because on a practical basis, they only had small photos available.

So designing in the browser was simply not a practical use of my time on that particular project so why force my workflow to match what people consider is “the right way”?

For the most part my design process leans heavily towards prototyping in the browser and I don’t think designing in the browser necessarily leads to blocky, predictable designs as I hope we demonstrated with a work project Cutting Edge Knives which was entirely “designed” in the browser with visual assets being the only thing we used Fireworks for.

Use your brain to compliment workflow

There are so many folks pushing so many techniques at the moment it’s often hard to keep track, let alone decide what’s “the right way”. Follow best practice when you can, but do what’s right for you, your team and your client and their users. If that means getting an overall feel for a site in Fireworks that a client can understand and work with – do it.

For many projects, you will probably get the biggest gains from prototyping in HTML because it’s simply an efficient way of working but don’t force your workflow into someone else’s idea of best practice. Use your brain, it’s still allowed!

* Happy client paid their invoice 2 weeks early.

Related posts:

1. Designing with lemons
2. Browser support and the future
3. Testing print stylesheets in browser

Initially I thought it would be a nice to not check my Twitter feed all the time, not getting emails through on my phone or even simply browsing the net on the bog. I still do all these things at work on the desktop and if I want to browse at home, I’ve got a laptop. I’m not deliberately limiting my access, just having an enforced phone break. While I never suffer the “problem” of too many notifications or distractions (protip – turn off notifications if you get too many), I figured it might be nice to not be tied to the phone.

I thought I’d like it, I don’t. I enjoy being connected – or more accurately – having the option of being connected.

For the most part, I’d consider myself a “Super Consumer” when it comes to the net and information online. I love it, I love that if I’m bored I can jump into my RSS feeds and learn something new. As an avid consumer of documentaries on TV and blogs/articles, I don’t just read about the web – I rarely read work related blogs outside of office hours. I much prefer New Scientist, Big Think, Long Good Read and my all time favourite source of information National Geographic. I track my marathon training and bike rides with Endomondo and I listen to streamed music while I run.

All this is currently gone. In short, a lot of my day now runs through my phone.

Ironically, now I’m currently using a phone that is so basic, it only has two functions – voice calls and text messaging – and it’s amazing how little I actually use those parts of the phone. Perhaps what now resides in my right jeans pocket is in fact a small computer with a telephone attached. Not the other way round. Either way, I’m looking forward to having my pocket computer back sooner rather than later!

No related posts.

As responsive web design marches ever closer to global domination, we see techniques banded around that may be experiments or proof of concepts but in some cases, they should probably never move past that.

“Responsive text” seems to be filling my timeline at the moment thanks to a tweet from purveyor of lovely design Veerle Peters saying:

You can see practical use of Responsive Text at sifterapp.com : resize your window and watch the Plans & Pricing tab.

— Veerle Pieters (@vpieters) February 16, 2012

As far as I can see, responsive text is largely a case of hiding text (not rewriting or delivering a different message appropriate to the context – eg. mobile focused copy for example) depending on screensize. I’m hoping I’m wrong on this because I honestly don’t get the practical use here on a couple of levels. Allow me to explain through the medium of screenshot and dance*.

What’s going on here then?

Well, in this example (and you can also take a look at Frankie Roberto’s demo) you’ll perhaps notice a couple of things. You see two versions of Sifterapp.com at different screensizes to show two different breakpoints.

What Veerle tweeted this morning was a “good example of responsive text” on the Pricing & Plans tab. I’m not sure I either understand the need for this or support the way it alters this sort of content. Here’s a couple of notes on what I saw happening:

1. At full screen, the navigation refers to “Pricing & Plans”
2. At smaller resolutions (tablet size mainly) it now only refers to “Pricing”. Do they only offer information on their plans to users on large screen devices or is the “plans” part redundant? I assume not as all screensize versions link to /plans/ – That’s confusing right – You clicked on “Pricing” but on your small screen, you went to a page that outlines plan details first.
3. To achieve showing/hiding the “Plans &” part of the tab, it’s wrapped in a span, not the end of the world on a single navigation tab but good luck if you start going down the path of class=”additional-info” as Frankie demonstrates in his demo paragraphs. I can’t immediately think what a nightmare maintaining that sort of copywriting style would be for actual page content and tying it into breakpoints! (also, keep in mind the bit where I asked about hidden text and whether it’s redundant if you have to hide it)
4. Show stuff! Hide stuff with display:none !important; – Responsive design is many things, there are many little tricks and techniques that combine to create a wondrous tool to make websites flexible. I’m not a fan of hiding elements on a screen in this way for a number of reasons that I’d hope are fairly obvious to all.

It’s a demo though right?

I appreciate Frankie’s demo above is just that, he’s clear on that (and offers potentially about the only use case I could think of) and I congratulate the effort, everyone should experiment with the web. The Sifter app site is a live site. Not a demo or proof of concept.

Perhaps I’ve drunk a little too much of the #OneWeb Kool-Aid and think if your content is too bloated and you have to hide parts of it on smaller devices then you might need to refocus your efforts there. Along with that, perhaps I’m becoming a grumpy tosser about a lot of responsive web terminology but I do try and at least figure out what I’m working with and whether an approach might be suitable but this sort of thing doesn’t seem to have any place in good practice.

Maybe I’m wrong in how I’ve interpreted the Sifter app example and what it’s trying to achieve, feel free to tweet me and tell me if I am but a quick look at the design, code and copy suggests “responsive text”, despite being tweeted by some really clever folks doesn’t look like something I’m going to be embracing any time soon.

For the most part, Jim echoes my thoughts here:

If you can say something efficiently in 30 words, why would you ‘enhance’ that with more words for users with bigger screens? Mental.

— Jim Newbery (@froots101) February 16, 2012

* There is no dancing.

Related posts:

1. Using text shadow? Don’t forget highlighting
2. Beefing up web fonts with text shadow

Ironically, I ended up finding the best place to leave and dip into the book was actually in the bathroom, scene of much my unhurried mobile browsing and book reading. Now I’ve got the chance to briefly reflect on what I gained from reading the book and what you might too if you’ve not bought it already.

Author Luke Wroblewski is one the people I often refer to when looking up mobile development practice and technique, his blog is a rich source of information and constant updates and perhaps it’s because for the most part, my learning and workflow seldom relies on hard copies of books that I found Mobile First turned out to be a nice reminder of technique but of more interest to me was actually a bit of a background overview of what’s happened in mobile so far and what’s happening (TL;DR: Everything is changing all the time) that I probably won’t find myself dipping in and out of the book again as people often do with reference books.

Most of my learning is done through following the people I do on Twitter and subscribing to an ever growing series of RSS feeds from designers and developers who push the envelope and innovate as well as experiment.

The book does highlight and explain a lot of interesting history and development but perhaps because I left it a while to read, much of the information within has been disseminated around the net in various forms. That’s not to say I know it all, not by a long stretch, just that the parts relevant to my work were things I’d seen.

The information on Gestures, apps and HUI was especially interesting as I’m still very much building responsive websites, not apps or hybrids and there is a wealth of good advice and guidelines on input methods and techniques I’ll be making use of.

It’s well written, concise and shows good examples. As you’d expect from Luke and A List Apart.

Definitely worth buying but if you’re already working on responsive websites I’d perhaps venture to say you might find that some parts already discuss things you’ve come across in your work but of course that doesn’t apply to everyone!

Related posts:

1. An IE6 option -Treat as mobile
2. 2011 in review
3. Mobile specific landing pages – good or bad?

Typically responsive menus work in two ways

• Select replacement with javascript (see Touchdown which is a good script to do this)
• Jump navigation with media queries and a tiny bit of extra markup

This is the latter. It’s nothing fancy but hopefully it’s a quick and easy option for someone. Feel free to grab, share, tweet and modify to your hearts content.

Simple, responsive JS free jump navigation

Best bet is to have a look at the demo or download it (55) and poke around.

The simple jist of it is that it’s a normal list which we position at the bottom of our screen using position:absolute (because it’s built mobile first) and then we turn into an inline list that appears at the top of the page using some standard styling for bigger screens. You decide your own breakpoints etc. What’s in there is simply what I was working with on a particular project that I built this for.

Benefits

• Simplicity & speed
• Not reliant on javascript
• Just HTML & CSS with some media queries so easy to customise
• Menu is in correct place in source code and only needs a single extra “jump” link

Drawbacks

• Needs an extra link to create the “jump” bit
• Probably not ideal for larger menus with dropdowns/more than half a dozen links

The nice thing about this sort of navigation is the simplicity, I only use a single extra link in the source code to create the “Jump to navigation” that appears on small screens. The rest is a simple list, there’s no duplication of list+select and it doesn’t need javascript and the “navigate site” title is a pseudo element.

From current experience I’m finding Touchdown type scripts are a better way of updating larger navigation blocks, particularly those where they are a couple of levels deep with dropdowns etc. In the example here our clients website only has a few main sections so this is fine. As ever, this is some rough working code not a “you have to do this” so feel free to evaluate and use or not.

Hope it helps, I’d sure appreciate you sharing it if it does!

Related posts:

1. A few responsive development resources
2. A simple IE6 upgrade script

TL;DR: Great day, great range of speakers and topics and run fantastically well by Kimb and Matthew at the Barnsley DMC.

Sadly I missed two talks, first Jonny Allbut about freelancing and also Tom Hudson’s about writing testable PHP but got started with another well polished, impeccably delivered talk from everyone’s favourite Microsoft employee, Martin “The Beebs” Beeby.

Martin Beeby

As you’d expect from someone paid to talk to designers and developers at conferences, the Beebs has a really nice style talking at length about the reasons IE got into the mess it was and some of the very impressive steps Microsoft are taking with IE9 & 10 to re-engage with the community and users to create a better product. Here are some of the notes I took from Martin’s talk.

• Microsoft are working hard to build a new OS with a great browsing experience and engaging users more to deliver that
• IE6 WAS a great browser in the back, it won the browser wars. The mistake MS made was waiting 6 years to make updates
• Microsoft didn’t consult enough with standards bodies and developers, they just looked internally for feedback
• The big aim for IE9 & 10 is to allow developers to confidently write  one and deploy without as many conditional hacks
• MS have a more open attitude towards engaging with developers now, the IE10 public preview reported 17000[maybe 1700?] bugs that may otherwise have been missed in internal development testing
• Microsoft are currently testing silent updates of IE6 to IE8 in Australia and Brazil with plans to push this global this year
• Windows8/IE10 has a pointer API which allows development of mouse, touch and stylus input with a single codebase
• IE10 is an application
• IE9 displays text better than other browsers thanks to sub-pixel rendering – particularly when zoomed
• The reason text-shadow wasn’t included in IE9 because in conjunction with sub-pixel rendering, it wasn’t fast enough
• A demo of an IE10 site using offline caching was very impressive. Only had to visit site once with web connection for it to available offline (including seaching, pages not viewed yet etc)
• Many demos and resources available at Martin’s site – http://thebeebs.co.uk/prepare

A particular highlight of Martin’s talk is the IE developer opinions video comedy gold.

Harry Roberts

A lot of front end developers will know of csswizardry but amazingly, this was actually Harry’s first public talk – “Breaking good habits”. You wouldn’t have known, he delivered a good overview of his CSS and HTML workflow and techniques including the theme of abstract naming and creating flexible but robust code based on his experiences working for BSkyB and leading a major front end rebuild. These were my notes from Harry’s talk.

• Writing extensible code requires you to stop thinking in terms of “pages”. You need to try thinking more in terms of components and abstractions
• Don’t use ID’s in your code – ever
• Avoid being over specific with naming and css selectors
• “CSS class names are neither semantic or not semantic; they are sensible or not sensible” and “it’s better to be pragmatic than pretty” (Quotes via Chris Murray’s write up)
• Strive to keep components free of dimensions then they’re easier to move around
• Abstractions mean DRYer code
• Better to build a solid site that doesn’t break than a pretty one that breaks and is inflexible

CSS ID’s are like marriage, easy to commit to but it’s easy to run into trouble later and further down the line, the children can be affected too. Harry Roberts

The main focus and drive for Harry’s talk was that you shouldn’t be scared to add in the occasional div (they’re “semantic freebies” after all) if it creates a more robust site. Semantics are good but sensible and solid coding is what everyone should aim for.

Bruce Lawson

Much like Martin, Bruce tours the world as a representative of Opera, and much of his talk was based on the work he does (and has done in the past) on accessibility in particular the amazing strides being made with HTML5 video including things like subtitling with live, selectable HTML text.

I have to admit I don’t work to the level of detail Bruce spoke about but I thoroughly enjoyed his talk and I’m happy knowing someone with that level of knowledge and passion is looking after this part of the web for us all.

Matt Brailsford

I missed Matt’s talk at the Umbraco festival last year about Knockout.js and as someone who doesn’t write any JS I have to admit the “intro” was a bit beyond me as it did contain samples of code which I didn’t understand but I know Pete and Tim who I went with were drooling at the simplicity and power on offer.

Matt did include a couple of demos including a super quick, simple todo list (be ashamed makers of todo list apps, it’s really not that hard!) and some filtering stuff which I definitely felt we could make use of in real applications for work so technical for sure but delivered in the Karminators usual casual style and he’s always a friendly chap to speak to after if you have any questions.

Craig Burgess

I really enjoyed Craig’s talk “The mad scientists of the information highway” which was a really well delivered, personal keynote about how he spends his time making things for the pleasure of doing it and that designers and developers working together on little fun, personal projects is a good thing (totally agree!).

Craig’s presentation style was excellent and as with the other speakers, the passion for the subject came through clear as anything and just made you want to get back home and start making all those little fun projects you didn’t start and moaned about stuff instead. His call to make things for the joy of making them rather than trying to monetise or get millions of likes is something I definitely subscribe to.

Kevinjohn Gallagher

Looking at my notes this morning, they simply said: “My new favourite angry man”.

It would be pretty easy to leave it at that and I’m sure anyone who’s seen Kevinjohn talk before probably knows he’s not one to pull punches. At Digital Barn his talk “The Emperors new clothes” took aim at a lot of things, including WordPress and their *unusual* development team setup and testing policy, why responsive web design is a sham, project management, some tenuous links to Star Trek slides and much more.

It was machine gun stuff and while I didn’t really agree with all of his points, I can’t argue with a great presentation style and saying some of the things he did to create discussion points because often taking an extremely strong view on something and then telling everyone else they’re wrong is a good way to at least start a discussion. It appears Kevinjohn is also more than happy to discuss his opinions over several beers too which is never a bad thing!

A couple of post talk pints

It was nice to go round the corner to a local with a lot of the attendees and have a couple of pints before heading home. It was a pleasure chatting with Bruce and Harry over a pint as I’d never met either. Lovely chaps. Sorry I didn’t get to catch up with a few of the other folks, there’s never enough time at these things! Perhaps someone should organise a conference without the conference bit. Just a twitter meetup!

Thanks to Tim for dropping me off back in Huddersfield, much appreciated.

Slides, blogs and other resources

A few folks have written up their thoughts too

• Blog review - Chris Murray
• Blog review – Pete Duncanson
• Blog review – Matt Brailsford
• Slides – Mad scientists of the information highway – Craig Burgess
• Slides – Breaking Good Habits – Harry Roberts
• Slides – An introduction to Knockout.js – Matt Brailsford

Feedback for the organisers

Kimb & Matthew put on a really top notch day, got really great speakers and venue and are just nice chaps. Can’t really argue with a day like that for the cost of £0.00 either. I’m sure I’ll speak for anyone else who was there and say I look forward to the next one – which I hope there will be!

A bonus giveaway!

I won a copy of Bruce and Remy Sharp’s Introducing HTML5 book, I’d like to give it away to a student or freelancer in Yorkshire. Follow me on Twitter for that one while I try and figure a fair way to give it to someone :)

Photo credit

No related posts.