And now the fun begins

Today marked the last day of my “work” here at SXSW and now it’s play time. It’s only been two days of the conference, but it seems like I’ve already done a week’s worth of stuff. My two sessions both went extremely well from my perspective and the feedback I’ve received has also been very good so far.

“Ruining the User Experience” was yesterday and I think Sarah and I worked really well together. It flowed well and felt really tight, so I was extremely happy. And being that we were speaking in the “rock and roll room” to a much larger audience than I would have expected, I’m very pleased it went so well. I think we managed to pack a lot of good information into the 25 minutes and nailed the time pretty well dead-on. I do kind of wish the session had been a bit longer as I would have liked to guide the attendees through a few more examples, but I still think we managed to open a lot of eyes (and minds), so I am happy about that. And we left them wanting more, which is never a bad thing either.

I’m not sure exactly how helpful they will be for people (at least not until the audio is posted), but I have uploaded the slides for the session. For those who saw me give a session by the same name at The AJAX Experience in October, this is a real departure from what you saw. I tore the old one to shreds and built this new one from scratch. Attendees at AjaxWorld in New York next week will be treated to a solo 45-minute version of this session with a few added examples.

My second session, “The Future of JavaScript” was another 25-minute “power session” and I think it went equally well. It was much more geeky than most of my other sessions have been, with tons of code samples demonstrating some of the really cool stuff in JavaScript 1.6 and 1.7. As John Resig mentioned to us at bowling tonight, Andrew and I were going through the features of the two language upgrades “pretty rapid-fire,” but I think it worked well as a power session because we came in fast and hit the packed room with a lot of new information. I think extending it to 45 or 60 minutes would have been way too overwhelming. As promised, I have posted the slides from that session as well, so folks can copy the examples we used and play around with them on their own.

I plan to relax a bit now that the important stuff is over. It was a little too rainy to hit the parties tonight after the bowling shindig, but I hope to engage in a bit more after-hours socialization tomorrow and Tuesday.