I spent a great weekend up in London at the Scripting Enabled conference and hack day. It was really great to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while and to meet new people as well. There were a couple of “click” moments like bumping into Peter Abrahams while scanning through the alphabetically-challenged name tags and then figuring out that the lovely lady from Devon was Laura Whitehead who had recently blogged about my list of accessibility videos!
The Scripting Enabled difference
I come away from web conferences and geek meets inspired and chomping at the bit to get working on some of the ideas that have come out of such events. I get back to my cave, start blogging about something that I need to get out there, get distracted by something I wanted to look up (“Right, let’s open that in another tab and deal with it later”), rarely properly finish the entry, get back to doing proper work and not find the time to work on that cool idea or at least put the idea out there. Well, no more, damn it!
What has been the difference at Scripting Enabled this week? The hack day which followed the day of talks and discussion made sure I took the time out to do something with an idea.
Doing the hack day straight after the talks meant things were fresh in our minds and a lot of the clever people who were at the conference were on hand for the day of hacking to work with on an idea and to bounce ideas off of. Having people in the same room with different abilities and disabilities really made the hack day a hive of activity.
On top of that, the event was free to attend. Christian did a fantastic job of pulling together the sponsorship, venues, speakers, hackers… There are lots of people who have given to this event to bring together great people to produce results. I can’t wait for the next one now!
What did I do? I worked in a group of beautiful people to improve accessibility of maps on the Web using the Google Maps API. We were so chuffed to have something to show at the end of the day, but we’re not quite ready to show the world yet. Expect more words from me on that.
In the meantime, check out the photos from the event and keep an eye on the Scripting Enabled site.
5 Responses to “Scripting Enabled debrief”
Thanks for the summary. It sounds great and wish I could have gone but i was tied up (all revealed soon).
Maps project sounds exciting and is much needed.
Cheers
really good to catch up with you over Scripting Enabled and hear about all your exciting plans. The work you and the guys did on Google Maps was excellent and can’t wait until you can unleash it on the world!
I’m very interested to see what you’ve cooked up with maps as well š
Thanks for the comments.
@Steve: A shame you couldn’t be there. I met another guy from Mozilla on the hack day, but his name escapes me.
@Henny: Great to catch up with you too. Thank you for your suggestions and help.
@Derek: When we started on the hack, Ann showed me your reworking of the Google Maps interface on the Iron Feathers routes – great work! Talk about building on the shoulders of giants. š
I’ve just put the code from the hack day into a Google project, so we’ll tidy it up and release it really soon!
Jon – looking forward to seeing it. We’ve actually got some improvements to the maps we’re about to make, so would be interested in discussing what you’ve got planned, if you’re interested in talking a bit about it before you make it public? Let me know…