Nick Pellant did a stella talk about Building Your Company. I was worried it would overlap on the things mentioned in mine, but it didn’t at all. He seemed to cover everything that I didn’t have time to mention, and I was quite jealous of the way he presented while walking across the stage, without notes, whereas I stayed pretty much glued to the spot. He also had very few slides, meaning the attention was focused purely on what he was saying. His presentation style seemed to echo that of Ryan Carson (watch out Ryan) which is perhaps expected since Nick works in the same offices as Carsonified. He even gave out lovely free posters at the end which cover all the points he mentioned. These are handouts you don’t want to throw away. All in all, a great speaker and also very talented at his work.

Jamie Rumbelow did a talk about APIs which I was really impressed with. He’s 14 and seemed completely relaxed with talking about something quite complex to a room full of people. He is also very enthusiastic, and was asking me how he could help with Scrunchup. A very sound guy, and one to keep an eye on.

If you could buy stocks in teenagers, I would buy as many as I could in James Proud. This is an 18 year old guy who has his head well and truly screwed on. He gave a pitch about his project, Gig Locator, and blew away the audience and the panel. This guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. He knows his product really well, has good ties in his product’s industry, and keeps his two feet on the ground at all times. He’s business savvy and an engaging speaker, as well as having a really decent product. This guy is gold dust. Conference organisers take note.

Then there was Greg Cooper. Greg has made the decision to work purely in UI design for social networks, which is pretty smart in my opinion. As his specialism is quite niche, it will be really interesting to see what Greg is working on in the next few years. I’m sure he’ll be in hot demand by a lot of companies.
His presentation was really good, he touched on things like the importance of designing for the extremes – specifically designing how it would look if someone had a really long name which is something so many designers don’t think about.
Sadly, most people had left the conference before Greg started his talk, so not many people got to hear it. I guess this is the cost of making a conference free.

I enjoyed Charlie McDonnell‘s talk a lot. It wasn’t about Web Design or Development, but about the life of a teenage YouTuber, which brought me back to my Media Studies days. If you haven’t heard of charlieissocoollike, check out his videos, specifically this one which is about tea. One of the interesting things he mentioned was that some of the things he is doing with agencies like the BBC is breaking ground in New Media, and him and these big organisations are on the same level, both trying different things and not quite sure what will happen.

I really enjoyed my time at the conference. It was great to catch up with Jon who came all the way from up North, and it was nice to be in a room full of like minded people of a similar age to me.  As with any conference in its first year, it has room for improvement, but I think it was a massive achievement that Rob and Grant managed to do it at all, and for free. The feedback from other attendees has been very positive, coming away with new contacts and ideas. And if inspiring a bunch of young people was their goal, they certainly achieved it, and I guess that’s all that really matters.