Wow what a week! EECI in Brooklyn was a huge success and the ExpressionEngine event of the year. Great speakers, great people, great organisation and an amazing venue! Here are some of my personal highlights...
DevDay
- Thrown together in groups of 8 - 10, I end up in a group of all developers (no designers) so we decide to build some kick-ass features and hope that the USB stick we get has some graphics pre-loaded on it (it doesn't).
- The guy sitting next to me, Luke from eecoder, becomes my best friend for the day as we throw ideas around.
- We present the site that we have built in a day to the entire room, wow the audience with our ratings bar and crack them up with our trademark "developer" design, including our (what's that, hover makes it italicised) call-to-action text in Georgia!
Conference Day 1
- Leslie Camancho (EllisLab CEO) reveals some exciting stats about ExpressionEngine, good news about the state of the company and a nice license update for CodeIgniter.
- David Dexter demoes the beast that is BrilliantRetail (now I get the blue gorilla illustration). Seriously impressive amount of features (that must have taken a while), although personally I still prefer CartThrob's philosophy and implementation.
- Lodewijk Schutte talks about parse order in detail, highlighting unexpected bahaviour and performance factors.
- Aaron Gustafson talks about progressive enhancement and graceful degradation - this topic can get very in-depth - and how we can start using HTML5 now.
- Am chatting with some attendees when one of them (@cwcrawley) mentions a "great add-on development cheat sheet" - he is referring to this - love it when that happens!
Conference Day 2
- Matt Weinberg offers up 10 ways to rock ExpressionEngine - mentions my loop plugin and some other great tips for EE developers.
- Brian Warren presents his talk on how to make client-friendly experiences with EE that really makes me think twice about client interaction and thier specific data input needs.
- Mark Huot shares some nice coding conventions for developing EE add-ons, in particular his config and mhbase files.
- Afterparty with my fellow ExpressionEngine community members... need I say more?
A big THANK YOU to Robert for organising the event. I'm already looking forward to next year's EECI and any upcoming EE events in Europe, which I would even be willing to help organise.
I have only mentioned some of the talks above. Check out the links to all of the slides from the conference.