Day 2 of the jQuery UK conference was the formal conference day with about 700 people in attendance.

It felt quite strange going to an open source conference for a none fringe project, particularly one that is treated as a product and used by many thousands of websites

On one side they do formal updates as you would expect from a corporation but as no one can fire them and they have no shareholders or such they can also tackle tricky subjects head on as well as take insults personally, which is a lovely change (although prone to a bit of ranting)

Much of conference context was very different to traditional corporate conferences due to the age of the attendees ( or rather the time they have been in IT) so they don’t have the history and background that many old farts have, as a presenter I am used to trying to pull people into this year (or even decade) while on the other hand dealing with people who have been programming computers since I was in nappies, in contrast this audience had a lot of people who are totally cutting edge but has only been in the business for a a few years (God I feel old).

The Good

• Excellent Content, bloody hell I don’t think there was a single time slot that I did not want to be in 2 places at once, it was also placed well (the hardware hacking session at the end was the best finale)
• Slide decks, I felt quite ashamed of my own slide decks in comparison to the ones used here and mine are a long way from being the worst I have seen, all of the side decks were interactive, responsive and browsers based, asking around came up with 3 possible candidates for the software doing the magic Slides, Proxi and reveal-js although my vote goes on reveal-js as that runs on node.js and I saw a lot of URLs that matched its pattern, anyway its time to buck up my ideas on that score.
• Organisation and refreshments for the conference was organised by White October who kept everything ticking over just nicely with unlimited red bull and water, yahhhh

The Less Good

• The were 3 tracks and basically only the main track had enough room in it, the other 2 tracks did not have enough capacity, I did not manage to get into any of them and neither did a lot of other people
• Not really for beginners, I know that sounds stupid but it was generally taken as a given that you knew jQuery and used it on a daily basis, this was not a conference if you were new to jQuery and wanted to know what it was about and how to use it best.

⇓ Even though the actual conference was on an industrial estate, it was a very pretty industrial estate

⇑ Coo a full conference, not seen that in a while

⇑ The hardware hacking session was roll around on the floor funny, very well done and opened up lot of avenues that you can put your javascript knowledge to work with

⇑ The goodie bag was excellent, no waste and thankfully in a carrier bag so there was no need to chuck out another useless and crummy backpack, I even kept some of the bits of paper as they were informative not just shinny things for directors to read, the freebies offered by the vendors obviously did not come from marketing as they were actually useful,

AngularJS has been a library that I never really saw the point of, back end server languages + the excellent front end frameworks such as jQuery and bootstrap have always delivered far more than even my most demanding corporate clients could want or need,  however while booking my ticket to the jQuery conference 2014 I  noticed that one of the workshops being held beforehand was entitled ‘Diving into AngularJS’  I figured that perhaps I just did not appreciate the framework’s better points and I should man up and learn it, also the fact it was being presented by Peter Bacon Darwin a well known member of the AngularJS world and a published author was not going to hurt

Initially I thought I had made a mistake, there were lots of mistakes in the printed version of the exercises and a distinct lack of structure to the course, then I pulled the stick out my arse and started playing proper attention,  the course was never designed to be completed in one day the material is a full course that you can do at your own leisure with all materials located on https://github.com/petebacondarwin/foodme,  Peter was there to guide you over the tricky humps, answer your questions and WTF moments as well as give you the background reasoning to a lot of the baffling areas of angular,

The day was in microcosm an exact replica of the classic AngularJS learning curve –V and Peter’s presence was the reason for that, hopefully this means I wont hit this save curve on a live project

In additional it provided me with a personal epiphany when it comes to javascript, I have never really enjoyed the asynchronous nature of javascript, it never had the same control that I am used to with things like Java multi-threading or better still Scala’s Actors, but peter took me though the whole thing and introduced me to the https://github.com/kriskowal/q library and its AngularJS derivative $q, I had been using javascript promises the same as everyone else (even if we don’t call them that) but this really opened my eyes on the whole subject 🙂

Frankly put I learnt more than my brain can absorb in a day, very very good value