On monday 27th October I attended the Trondheim Developer Conference in Norway. Here is a brief writeup of the event.

 

The conference which was held in the lavish Clarion Hotel on the shore of one of Norways largest fjords had a number of high profile speakers: Douglas Crockford, Chris Coyier, Harry Roberts and Christian Hellmann to name a few. I was excited to see what these industry leading developers had to say, and the prospect of perhaps sharing a few beers with these guys would be well worth the 800km trip up from Stockholm.

 

Overall the event was very well organised, the food was outstanding. The talks themselves (There were many to chose from) ranged from 30 minutes to 45 giving plenty of time for breaks in between to mingle and grab the free snacks and coffee on offer.

 

Douglas Crockford covered some JavaScript history and went onto talk about the upcoming features in ECMA Script 6 (ES6) most seem really cool although his vison of not having to use the 'this' keyword, was pretty hard to understand, but some cool things like block scoping using the 'let' keyword looks like a welcome addition.

 

Harry Roberts covered a very high level system for organising huge css, he's coined it as ITCSS which stands for Inverted triangle css, in short css should be written is specificity order ranging from low specificity selectors through to the highest. He covers this in greater depth here: http://csswizardry.com/2014/10/the-specificity-graph/

 

Christian Hellmann who's pretty much the spokesperson for Mozilla talked alot about HTML 5, Entiled how HTML5 Missed it's graduation day, loads of useful information:

 

Chris Coyiers talk was all about SVG and why we should all be using it, he explained in detail why SVG is a replacement for png sprites and icon-fonts.

 

By far the most fun part of the day was sharing beers with the developers, spent a short time with Chris Coyier but he had to leave early due to jet lag and tiredness. We later went upto the skybar where we sat with Harry Roberts, Chistian Heilmann and some others discussing all things web in detail. It was a great experience to see how the guys at the top of our industry tick, how they got there etc, gained a lot of useful knowledge and inspiration.

 

They are hosting another conference this time next year and I highly recommmend it.

Sounds awesome. How many people would you say were there?

 

I'll add it to the list of events to look out for. I've only been to one major conference which was in Cardiff, but it was cool because it was like being paid to go on holiday (if your work cover the costs).

IIRC there were around 600 attendees and roughly 30 speakers. Food was included plus one free beer at the bar which included live music. Ticket cost was around the £250 mark, which isn't bad when you consider the calibre of the speakers and the fact Norway is one of the most expensive countries on the planet. A beer usually costs around £8 to compare with UK prices.

Edited October 30, 201411 yr by rbrtsmith