9th October 2010

FOWA London 2010

In keeping with my 'write a blog post when I go to an event' approach to blogging... I was at fowa last weekend!

Carsonified were kind enough to allow me to attend as a helper on the day (cheers again to Keir and Lou for sorting that for me). Which meant I was one of the 'Turqoise Shirts' helping with registration, ushering, getting prints done etc.

As an aside I'd recommend offering to help out at events. It's not just that you don't have to fight for (and pay for) a ticket. If you're less gregarious than some, or are travelling alone it's a ready made way to meet people including the organisers and potentially speakers when they register. You're also still able to get to your "can't miss" talks.

This was my second fowa, having attended in 2008 and I must say, I enjoyed it thoroughly. The event appeared to have been downsized slightly since then but The Brewery is a great venue with a very friendly feel. I particularly liked the 'loft party' cushion area at the back of the porter tun.

The highlight for me was catching John Resig, creator of jquery, discussing jQuery mobile and jQuery Templates. Some exciting stuff here for us web devs. The idea of double binding a json object to an html template (that was brought down in the markup of the page) seems like such a clean approach to building on the clientside. I've also, since the event, watched and enjoyed Jason Calacanis's keynote. Grating and potentially intimidating as he is he does speak a lot of sense (in my view anyway).

I'd also recommend catching Joe Stump talk about location aware apps in his very enthusiastic style. I'm still waiting for that Role playing game where my dragon is less effective if the geo space I'm in is under stormy conditions!

Some related linky link links..