Following the Geekmeet in Stockholm my ex-colleague from etoys (first .com boom) days – Tim Heighes – asked me to come to his new abode – BWIN – and talk about the current developer market situation and ideas what the future of JavaScript and web development might be. Furthermore the idea was to tell the business about the benefits of opening up data to the world.
I was scheduled to give three talks – an overview in the morning about where web development is heading and two technical talks to a smaller, expert audience in the afternoon. As Tim made the mistake of getting me drunk after the Geekmeet I didn’t have any time to prepare dedicated materials, but ad-libbed the overview showing live examples of sites and products I talked about, used GreaseMonkey to show how to prototype changes to web sites and generally reacted to questions and requests from the audience.
The afternoon talks were the performance talk from Geekmeet and my maintainable JavaScript material from the Fronteers conference (also available as a video in two parts part1, part2).
More important than the material was the communication with the teams in bwin and seeing what kind of challenges they have to face in their line of work. That their weapon of choice to battle browser inconsistencies is jQuery was another nice touch for me as it is cool to hear how other libraries than the YUI are used in a large, professional development environment.
I’ve had a great time and hopefully managed to inspire bwin to work more efficiently and open to the world more. It was also good to get to know some great geeks working in the office.
After the workshop Tim took me out for a drink in the city of Stockholm and I ended the evening in the ice bar of my hotel (a bar made from ice with a constant inner temperature of minus five degrees centigrade and very yummy Absolute mix cocktails).
The next morning Tim and Robert Nyman from Geekmeet took me on a tourist trip around the city of Stockholm. I have to say the city is a very nice place indeed and Swedes are wonderful people to visit and work with. I think there is a chance I will be back soon.
