BarCampLA5, including YUI 101 Presentation Slides

I had a great time this weekend at BarCampLA5 (barcampla.org). It was a great event, despite some apparent venue hiccups and dramas behind the scenes, plus delays due to traffic from the LA Marathon on Sunday. It went really well, held at the AOL facility in Beverly Hills. Kudos to the planners, particularly Jason Cosper and Crystal Williams — though an event like this really is made of the people who attend and talk and listen and socialize and sing and question and answer and game and twitter!

On Saturday I overcame my natural inclination to avoid doing talks by snatching a last minute open Session slot and doing a WordPress Birds of a Feather Q and A / Discussion. Thanks to all who attended that for your terrific contributions — I learned a lot myself and will write that up this week in a separate post. If you blogged about that session please drop me a line via email — joe [ at ] artlung [ dot ] com.

The same goes for my talk yesterday. Thanks for attending and contributing! I felt it went well. At the end there was a suggestion that perhaps an introduction to building web pages or to using JavaScript might be well received at the next BarCampLA. I’m going to give some thought. Any other suggestions as to what the barcamp audience might like to hear from an aging front-end web developer are welcome. Also, the slides from my talk: YUI 101, are available in PDF form: YUI 101.

Vaughn Hannon blogged the session, albeit briefly! Though I disagree with the spirit of these words: “A short impromptu bashing of Microsoft and Silverlight just took place…it’s coming, like it or not”. I think Silverlight is marvelous and cool, but I feel like in the competitive landscape, what I’ve learned is that the technologies that are more closed, provide less freedom, and supported by fewer vendors keep losing in the long run unless they get very wide adoption soon. And truth be told, I don’t see Silverlight busting out large. I’ll add I could be wrong, but the road of web progress is littered with cool technologies that never reached critical mass.

Oh, and I also particularly want to thank Doug Welch for lending me his laptop for my presentation and working hard to get it and the darn projector to talk nicely.

To all the folks I met this weekend and who are here because of this presentation, welcome, and feel free to introduce yourself in the comments on this post. I intend to write up the sessions I attended in another post.

And now, visuals! You can see all the photos I took at this flickr set and in the global flickr space you can search for photos tagged barcampla5. As of this morning it looks like 735 photos were tagged in that way. Lots to look at from a great event. If you look for photos tagged “artlung” you’ll find photos of me, and man, I don’t like much of what I see. Thank goodness summer is coming. I definitely felt my size this weekend and that has got to change. Oh, and I even took two grainy videos with terrible audio with my cell phone: Original Song by Madeleine Wright and Here’s a Quarter by Doug Welch and Madeleine Wright. I can’t sing but it was fun hanging out and pretending I could with the guitar-people. I also enjoyed playing a little Rock Band, singing only, of course.

Okay, I have to get in gear. Thanks for visiting, Happy Monday, and more on BarCampLA5 this week!