Journal tags: fullfrontal09

Recent events reminded me again of what a great place Brighton is for a geek like me. Remy’s all-JavaScript Full Frontal conference went superbly—hence the effusive praise over on the DOM Scripting blog. James and Nat organised a superb Skillswap on the subject of wayfinding. If you missed it, the audio is up on Huffduffer.

It seems like Brighton has a high scenius level.

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene.

It’s fitting then that, Brian Eno, the man who coined the term “scenius”, will be curating the Brighton Festival next year.

There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why Brighton should be a geekier place than any other UK town. Sure, we could retroactively discover geographical or social conditions that favour Brighton but I think the truth is that it’s just a large-scale Schelling point.

And it’s not just a geek thing either. The music scene in Brighton is maintaining its reputation, although the scene is somewhat lessened by the recent demise of The Gilded Palace of Sin.

Occasionally, the worlds of geekiness and music mesh to form a glorious venn diagram of fun. The £5 App Musical Christmas Special was one such scenius supercollider. It featured free booze, live music from 100 Robots, and many tales of hackery including a demo of the absolutely wonderful Therething from Toby Cole of Build Brighton, one of the many Brighton geek institutions.

Lest I become too comfortable in my Brighton hive, I’m off to explore another geek scene tomorrow. I’m going over to Belfast to meet the geeks of N’orn Ireland. I’ll be speaking at Refresh Belfast about personal projects in general and the building of Huffduffer in particular. I’m looking forward to it. If you’re in the area, come along and say hello.

Usually when I write about an upcoming event, it’s because I’ll be speaking at it. But there’s an event coming up in eight weeks that I’m pretty excited about, where I’ll be an attendee rather than a speaker.

The cheekily-named Full Frontal will be taking place in the Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton on November 20th. It’s going to be all JavaScript, all the time. Christian Heilmann, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge, Simon Willison, and others will be on hand to blow your mind with all things scripty.

I’ve mentioned this event already over on the DOM Scripting blog but the reason I’m mentioning it here now is that this is the last chance to grab early bird tickets; an absolute steal at just £100.

Great location. Great line-up. Great subject matter. Great organiser.

See you there.

At the start of this year I made a vow to myself to reduce my level of overseas travel. It’s working out pretty well. My Dopplr animal has been downgraded from a squirrel to a butterfly.

I’ve been to a grand total of two conferences in the states this year; the obligatory South by Southwest in Austin and An Event Apart in Boston—it’s always an honour (and a surprise) to be asked to speak at that one. That’s quite a reduction compared to last year and it looks like I won’t be adding to that short list before the year is out.

Reducing my overseas travel hasn’t meant a reduction in attending great events. As well as all the Barcamps and Hackdays, London can boast some world-class conferences like @media and UX London. In fact, if I want to attend kick-arse conferences in the UK, I don’t even need to leave Brighton.

dConstruct is just over a month away. The line-up is particularly stellar this year. Rather than playing it safe, we’ve decided to push the boat out with the challenge of Designing for Tomorrow. To answer that challenge, we’ve lined up the finest minds of the next decade. Adam Greenfield! Mike Migurski! Russell Davies! (no, that one). Expect plenty of mind-boggling talk on ubiquitous computing, data visualisation, mobile design, and science-fiction interfaces.

Think it’s not relevant to your day-to-day work? Think again. And learn to exercise your imagination.

Anyway, tickets are a measly £125 so if you think that’s not worth it, might I suggest diverting your funds to getting a good psychiatrist.

There are still tickets left. If you haven’t been able to make it to dConstruct in previous years because it sold out too quickly, now’s your chance. If you have been to dConstruct before, then you know how great it will be. I’m hoping that the event will be sold out by the day of the event. Partly that’s because I want to see Clearleft’s faith in our peers’ thirst for knowledge rewarded, but mostly it’s because I’ve got a wager to that effect with Cennydd. If his pessimism is rewarded, I’ll be £1 out of pocket.

You’ve still got a few weeks to grab a ticket for the conference itself but if you’re planning to come along to one of the workshops in the run-up to the conference, you’d better act fast; the early bird price of £345—which includes a ticket to the conference—runs out in 48 hours. After that, a workshop costs £395.

Far be it for me to suggest which workshop you should book—they’re all going to be good—but might I point you to HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry which will be run by a trioka of Clearlefties; Richard, Natalie, and myself. They’ll be handling the CSS3 goodness and I’ll be regurgitating what I’ve been learning from immersing myself in the world of HTML5.

Maybe I should just get Remy to pop in and show off his demos but I suspect he’ll busy preparing for his own jQuery workshop the next day.

Not content with doing workshops, tutorials, screencasts, and a book, the tireless Remy Sharp is organising his own conference. Full Frontal will take place in the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton on November 20th. This is going to be a serious JavaScript geekfest. Get this: for a mere £100, you get Simon Willison, Peter-Paul Koch, Christain Heilmann and more. If you’re a JavaScripter and you’ve felt frustrated by the lack of your favourite scripting language at most web conferences, Full Frontal is guaranteed to satiate you.

Between dConstruct, Flash on the Beach, and Full Frontal, I may never have to travel outside of Brighton for a conference again.