Lisbon, Paris, AjaxWorld, Code Camp, UI11, WebGuild & Ajax Experience

The last few months have been pretty crazy. In one 8 day stretch I put in 17,000 miles in the air!

I had a wonderful time in Paris presenting a couple of sessions on design & developing for Ajax to the People in Action folks. It is interesting to see the excitement about "what is possible" being a world-wide phenomonon.

The same week Luke Wroblewski, Kevin Cheng, Peter Merholz and myself (we have dubbed ourselves the "Bay4") had a great time in Portugal in the wonderful city of Lisboa (Lisbon as we say) giving 4 back to back talks to the first annual SHIFT conference. Our wonderful hosts Bruno Figueiredo and Pedro Custódio gave us tours of the city. Most interesting (besides being in Portugal) was having discussions with people from all over Europe about what all these changes in the web world means to them.

In Portugal there are wonderfully bright folks who are starting to really get the whole concept of innovation. For so long (at least this is what I heard from multiple Portugese sources) there is a strong cultural influence that shuns failure. Of course the freedom to fail is a key ingredient to innovation and something that we generally cherish in the U.S. (probably to a fault).

I had a wonderful chat with an engineering manager, Bruno Pedro at Sapo (sapo.pt, largest site in Portugal) who echoed these sentiments. He shared his enthusiasm about the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as the Yahoo! UI library. Very encouraging to hear of the nice impact these tools are having around the world. He promises to share some of the exciting developments they will be making on this site.

You can check out photos from the various folks that attended as well as blog posts at Luke's blog, Luke's photos, Kevin's photos, Peter's photos and mine.

Closer to home I will be at the Silicon Valley Code Camp tomorrow (10/7/2006). There are 700 attendees and a bunch of us speaking. Its going to be at Foot Hills College this weekend in Los Altos, CA. Doug Crockford, Kent Brewster and myself will be giving talks from Yahoo!

This past week I spoke at the Ajax World Conference here in Santa Clara. Enjoyed giving my talk and had some great conversations afterward. But the highlight was getting to hear my fellow cube-mate, Doug Crockford, give his abbreviated Advanced JavaScript talk. Its definitely great material.

Next week I will be presenting an all day workshop with David (Heller) Malouf on Designing Rich Internet Applications at the UI11 Conference. Looking forward to the session (well over 100 signed up!) as well as the rest of Jared's exciting conference.

Then the next week I will be on a panel at the First Annual Web Guild Conference on "The New Web". I am an advisor for the Web Guild which usually meets over at the Googleplex. This looks to be a really great conference. Its very affordable and has an incredible lineup of great speakers like: Jared Spool (ui engineering), Ram Shiram (Founding Member Google), Marissa Mayer (Google VP), Kelly Goto (gotomedia) just to name a few. Still time to sign up!!

The next week Nate Koechley, Doug Crockford and I will be at the Ajax Experience. This was the best Ajax event I have attended (last event was in May) and I really look forward to hearing what the top quality speakers there have to say as well as connect with others in the field. That will be in Boston, hope you can join us there.