Last week I have attended Web expo in Prague. I think this was they third or forth conference. It took 3 days but the first day was fulfilled with quite expensive hands on sessions which I did not attend.
The sessions were taking place in four halls. Design, Coding, Agile and the last one was Business. I was mainly attending sessions in the Coding, Business and Design room. Actually in this order.
The organization was pretty good. There were only few things I would change for the next year. I would put the program of all rooms into every room. It would made things clearer. I would not lock the wifi. I did not really need access to internet but anytime I asked someone about the password none knew it. The last thing I would recommend to the organizers is to find someone with better English to present the main events. Hey do not ask me to do it, my English is crap ;)
The sessions
The sessions were pretty amazing. I did not really know there are profitable Czech projects out there with millions unique visitors a month who are making money. These were the sessions I have enjoyed the most. People who actually done it and they know what they are talking about.
The best session in the Design room was obviously the one with Ray from 37 signals. He has presented how to produce a project from start to finish. He showed how he makes sketches which he uses to produce html markup and how he then jumps into the Photoshop for little creative work and coming back to views to implement the back-end code. I like his approach a lot but I am more visual time of person and I do need to spend lot more time in Photoshop to see if things are working or not. His imagination is probably few levels ahead of me.
Bad session
I have only attended one really bad session. I was siting in the middle of the massive table where six people were sittings next to my right hand and six to my left hand. Why I am saying this? Just because I was not really in the position to leave the session easy way. I wasn’t probably the only one who felt the same way as I have noticed that about half of the people have left the room during the session. The talk was about implementing agile principles. I would very nicely say that it was complete misunderstanding what agile is and how it should be implemented. It has reminded me of some communist talkers who always had something to talk about but they did not understand a single point.
Overall experience
Looking at the event as whole it was great experience and I have really enjoyed every minute of it. The price could be slightly less but putting it on the company costs list just makes the trick.
Big thank you goes to Czech guys who organized the whole event very well and managed to invite interesting speakers from whole world. I hope there will be even more international speakers next year and lot more successful Czech internet companies.
