Reflections on EEUK13

Looks like this article is over a year old, so some of the technical solutions or opinions may be a bit outdated now.

After the break, Joel Bradbury demo’d some EE hybrids inspired by some of the real-world multi-platform clusterf***s he’s encountered. His EE/Shortlist/Wordpress mashup was particularly impressive. Whilst far from desirable – it showed it is possible to blend multiple platforms with EE when absolutely unavoidable in the real world. Weird, but pretty cool. A great first half to the day, and we all headed for lunch.

We kicked off the afternoon with MySQL expert Tim Mahoney who gave us very thorough primer on server setup and performance. This was Tim’s first time speaking and he did a great job on a topic that’s often overlooked by EE devs. His slides are going to be a great resource for many. After Tim we switched gears with some CSS from W3C Fellow Chris Mills, and he gave us a great overview of Flexbox and other future layout techniques, proposed new queries and selectors.

Time for our last break before the final push, starting with Carl Crawley taking on the tricky subject of multi-language EE development. He managed to inject some fresh insights into an old topic, including the importance of font size in some non-western character sets, and colours to use or avoid in some cultures. Last up was Christopher Imrie who has a history of dropping something big at his talks. He didn’t disappoint when he announced Entry Analytics. I know of several clients right away who will be delighted with this – a tremendous piece of work.

After-Party

We finished bang on 6 o’clock, and it all seemed to go without a hitch. Time to head over to Rain Bar and the EngineHosting-sponsored after-party. Pretty much everyone came along and many stayed on to the end. Somebody got the munchies later on so about 15 of us headed for a midnight curry – big thanks to Low for that! In a re-run of 2011, we finished off with a boogie in Tiger Lounge till about 3am.

Thanks to everyone who came. We had delegates from all over Europe, which was terrific. Thanks to our wonderful speakers who worked so hard. Thanks to Joel and Low for all their efforts. Thanks to our amazing sponsors, and thanks to the crews at Rain Bar and The Bridgewater Hall. Great to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. Hope everyone had a blast – I know I did!

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