Here’s a (very) quick review of the @media 2008 conference.

Overall: 4/5

I enjoyed the @media conference immensely. There were a good range of speakers and a lot of knowledgeable people to mingle with. The venue (SouthBank Centre - Queen Elizabeth Hall) was in an excellent area and was just about the right size. There were two stages; the main stage was where we spent most of our time with the second stage for the more intimate discussions/presentations. The subject matter of some presentations was very simple, but still contained nuggets of goodness. The conference is very accessible for the inexperienced and experienced developers/designers. Just go there with an open mind, and you will take away some vital knowledge.

Speakers: 4/5

Overall the quality of speakers was very good, a couple of individuals didn’t get their point across too well though (probably partially due to my mindset).

The questionables: Indi Young’s presentation on Mental Models I didn’t think hit the right spot, I was really interested in the subject matter but too much of the time seemed to be spent on case studies without covering the actual processes of handling and creating. Browyn Jones presentation The Book Was Better was a good subject matter for the conference (copywriting), but she seemed to struggle at first as the presentation used a lot of videos, she didn’t have enough content, she lost some of her notes and it was her first presentation (only a few things then ;)). It was enjoyable and covered some good areas of website content writing and it’ll be interesting to see how her presentation skills improve.

The mentionables: Nate Koechley (Yahoo) presentation on Professional Front-End Engineering was the best of the conference. He has a great presentational manner and covered a lot of content in a small amount of time. The last presentation of the conference seen was James Adam & Simon Willison’s Exploring the Server Side: Rails & Django. This deserves a special mention for being the most memorable for sheer entertainment value. James and Simon were “battling it out” with the two technologies Rails and Django. Both were excellent in knowledge and presentation. They didn’t go to deep into the languages but showed the simplicity and scalability of both. Django I have little knowledge of but this helped wet my appetite.