Last week, I was in London to give 2 talks. The first one was last Thursday, in one of the conferences I wanted to go ever since I learned my first CSS properties: Web directions @media. The second one was 2 days later in a smaller event called Standards.next.
Web Directions @media
I managed to get my @media talk early on schedule, so I could relax afterwards and enjoy the rest of the conference. Before I saw the feedback on twitter I thought they hated it, since the audience was silent and didn’t laugh at any of my jokes and asked no questions afterwards. However, I was wrong: The tweets about it were enthusiastic! Here’s a small sample:
You can play with the HTML version of my slides or view them on slideshare:
View more presentations from Lea Verou
I really enjoyed some of the other talks in @media, especially:
- Stephanie Sullivan’s “Modern CSS”
- Bruce Lawson’s “Multimedia in HTML5”
- Nicole Sullivan’s “Performance of CSS3 and HTML5”
Standards.next
The morning before my Standards.next talk, I woke up with a sore throat, a running nose and a blocked ear. I even thought about cancelling my talk, but I’m one of those people that have to be dying to change their schedule. So I went, and I’m glad I did, as I got to attend Peter Gasston’s incredible talk on CSS3 layout. I really learned so much stuff from that!
As for my talk (“CSS Secrets: 10 things you might not know about CSS3”), it went fine after all. I had some trouble hearing the questions, due to the blocked ear, but nothing too bad. I had trouble with my last demo, as I got confused and used background-origin: padding-box; instead of content-box, but nobody there hated me because of it, like I was afraid would happen if I ever screwed up one of my demos :)
That event was much smaller (it took place in a small room in a pub), so the tweets were much fewer, but still very positive:
https://twitter.com/patrick\_h\_lauke/status/74496751716929536
https://twitter.com/patrick\_h\_lauke/status/74501557349138432
https://twitter.com/patrick\_h\_lauke/status/74506910807764992
I found out afterwards that one particular lady in the audience complained about my pronunciation of the words “fuchsia” and “ems”. That’s what I would’ve said to her if I heard: “Here’s some breaking news to you: Not everyone is a native english speaker. Shocking, isn’t it? I would really be interested to hear your pronunciation if you ever did a presentation in Greek. KKTHXBAI”
Overall, I had a great time in London. I hadn’t been there for more than 10 years, so I had forgotten how beautiful city it is. I loved attending and speaking at both of those events, and I would like to thank Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp for inviting me to @media and Bruce Lawson for inviting me at Standards.next.