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Yesterday I attended the Kings of Code event for web developers where I had the opportunity to present on a topic very close to my heart: the development of front-end development. Of course I also saw most of the other speakers. Here's a little review of the day.

Peter Paul Koch (Quirksmode)

First up, at 9:30 AM, was PPK with a presentation on cross-browser JavaScript event handling. Most people were in on time, for a change and there were an amazingly little amount of laptops being opened by attendees. (something that usually annoys me alot) PPK, obviously no stranger to presenting delivered a flawless and technically very deep presentation about the differences between the W3C's events spec and the real world as implemented by Safari, IE, Opera and Firefox. Quote of the day: "I think I'll start looking into this Firebug thing, I hear it's pretty good."

Folke Lemaitre (Netlog)

Next up, was Folke who presented on the scaling of Netlog's back-end architecture. As a front-end developer, most of that stuff was somewhat over my head but interesting nonetheless. I know my eBuddy colleagues who deal with the scaling of our own platform were listening attentively :)

Mark Birbeck (W3C)

After the morning break, Mark Birbeck took the stage with a presentation about markup languages that I'm sure was not to everybody's tastes. I found it to be the most interesting talk of the day because he concluded that markup languages like XForms and SMIL are an excellent way to abstract the complexity of JavaScript away. That's something that I've been preaching since the early days of Backbase (and by the way, my subject of the presentation I gave at XTech 2006). Later on, I realized why Mark's name was so familiar. He was once responsible for building a plugin for IE that added XForms support.

Nate Abele (CakePHP)

Lots of controversy ensued when the first Nate took the mic. After a brief introduction about what frameworks are and why and when you should use one, he proceeded to rip apart some well-known competitors of his CakePHP framework: Zend, CodeIgniter (on which this blog is built) and Rails. It was quite funny actually and I found him to be refreshingly honest. A welcome change from the let's-pet-each-other-on-the-back- syndrome.

Nate Koechley (Yahoo!)

Unfortunately I had to miss this one, as I had to be someplace else. I heard it was really good though; a very comprehensive presentation about startup performance, even though a lot of the material was well-known to the crowd.

Open Source Pitches

As I still had to prepare some slides for my presentation I decided to miss out on these. I heard there was a lot of disappointment that the 5-minute Phusion Passenger pitch was spent on promoting Rails, in stead of Passenger.

Menno van Slooten (eBuddy)

I didn't see this one, but I heard it was pretty good ;) In all seriousness, I was really bloody nervous but luckily it was a very friendly crowd with lots of my old friends and colleagues. The presentation itself went pretty smooth in my experience with only a few hickups. If there's a next time I'll cover a more technical subject since I feel more at ease with that than with yesterday's subject matter: a look into the future of front-end developers. Here's a picture of me during the presentation.

John Resig (jQuery)

John absolutely blazed through a presentation that was obviously normally delivered in a much bigger timeslot. He took the big 4 in the world of Open Source JavaScript frameworks: jQuery, YUI, Dojo and Prototype and compared them on various levels, from unit test coverage to CSS selector speed. It was very, very interesting, but I think the crowd would have appreciated a more spicy presentation (for instance about processing.js) a bit more. At the end of his presentation he mentioned he was working on a new DOM CSS selector module (I believe he called it Sizzle) and showed a table with some query benchmarks that looked very impressive. I hope to see more of that soon.

Drinks at 11

Luckily my bosses were willing to be the main sponsor for the drinks afterwards in the excellent Club 11. The atmosphere was good, with the DJ playing some nice Motown soul & R&B tracks. People were stopping me to tell me what they thought of my presentation and the worst criticism I received was "I liked your presentation but I don't agree with what you said." I can certainly live with that.

Overall

I have nothing but good words for the organisation and the visiting crowd. The whole event was flawlessly orchestrated and the atmosphere was extremely enjoyable. I heard the coffee wasn't that good, but that's about it. In the end, I only regret not taking more time to talk JavaScript with Resig, PPK and Koechley. So thanks to Sander and the rest of the crew and I hope I can be a part of future events as well.