Austin

Fantastic city that I wouldn’t hesitate to revisit. As soon as I got to the hotel (which also hosted the conference) there was a block party down the street, very cool first impression!

Food

Texas BBQ! Unfortunately for me, the recommended spots were only open during conference hours. However, the hotel staff did a wonderful job with the breakfast and (especially) the lunches.

Food trucks where everywhere. No need for fast food at all.

It was really great to find a real juice bar the Daily Juice, as the closest thing in Hilo we have is Jamba Juice.

The Swag

The Conference

Audience: Large amount of MS .net shops. Very specific skillets, very few generalists. Predominately front-end UX and designers. Very few that write code

Responsive web design is the next big thing (that’s already here!). Nearly everyone I talked to had no live implementation. The complexity and edge cases are very off-putting for many. Many aren’t aware or are scared of the tools used for responsive.

SASS was seen as beneficial but many were scared of the command-line aspect of using the preprocessor and compass.

CSS animation was frowned upon and seen as boring as many did not like the involvement of js to swap classes.

Style Tiles: something i want to use.

Conclusion

I came back home energized and ready to go! Two speakers stood out to me:

• Mike Monterio. I took Mike’s talk on design responsibility to heart.
• Luke W. Both his talk and workshop were insightful. His opinions on multi-device design and solutions made these head scratching problems look easy.

• an event apart
• conference
• review
• training