I have to give props to Yahoo for organizing and hosting this two day unconference. This morning and afternoon had about 20 sessions plus a keynote, a choice of four sessions in each of five time slots plus a keynote from senior Yahoo Bradley Horowitz. A nice package of freebies at registration: t-shirt, 256MB USB stick, poetry magnets and a Nissan Design-style thermos.
I attended the keynote plus these:
- Hands on: CSS Reset, Fonts and Grids – very useful for me, an introduction to how the Yahoo User Interface library gives developers a browser-independent means to handle core CSS display and page layout issues.
- An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM – Douglas Crockford, one of the world’s top JavaScript experts, talked about the history, mistakes and scope of the language plus a bunch of smart tips.
- Keynote: Nice overview of why Yahoo did this event and their philosophy/attitude towards outside developers
- Getting Rich with PHP5 – Speaking of world-class experts, hard to get higher than Rasmus Lerdorf since he created the language; Rasmus focused on understanding performance of PHP apps (and specific techniques for measuring that) plus using web services/web APIs in PHP
- YUI Connection Manager Workshop – This is the YUI component that abstracts out the differences in XMLHTTPRequest object between browsers.
Dinner is next, then the Hack kickoff and then the big ‘mystery’ musical guest. Very amusing, the mystery is solved by reading the act name off the equipment crates, not Bruce but someone I’m happy to see in such a small setting, and free.
Later: The musical surprise was Beck. Which was pretty surprising to me, in that Yahoo must have splashed out the bucks to get him and that we got an act I actually enjoy. He and the band put on a terrific show, really rocking, all about the percussion so danceable too. I really only knew two of his songs, “Loser” and “Two Turntables and a Microphone”, but I could see myself picking up a couple of his records since there wasn’t one song in the 75+ minutes that I didn’t enjoy.
The show was funny too. There was a mini-stage set up at the back of the stage and roadies manipulated puppets, one looking like each band member, so that they played and sang along with the songs, with the whole thing shown on a big screen behind the band. With spacey special effects. Towards the end, the roadies brought out a dinner table (already set) and the band, except for Beck and Ryan, sat down. Ryan acted as waiter and Beck ‘serenaded’ the diners. Then the band start playing their forks and knives against the table, bowls and plates in a percussive rush.
So much fun! This reminds me of shows I went to long ago, like Little Steven & the Disciples of Soul at the Roxy in Los Angeles in 1982 and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at the Garden State Arts Center in the late ’80s.
BillSaysThis 