I’ve had a tough time sorting myself out after Sydney. After getting home, I spent most of that week recovering from some unpleasant bug (which, fortunately, didn’t rear its head until the day after the Web Directions South conference – though it did cut into a significant amount of my holiday time) and trying to find things I’d stashed in safe places. In the last week, I’ve been busy making contact with people I met at the conference.
It was definitely an interesting couple of days. Even though I never went with the expectation of learning anything directly useful as I’m neither designer nor programmer, it was a golden opportunity to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes in web development, before I get to see anything. Now I know what AJAX is, picked up some customer service tips, and sneaked a glimpse into the pervasiveness of computing in the next few years.
Social media came up a lot as well, and as I think it’s likely to grow massively in the next few years, it was definitely worthwhile to hear various people’s takes on that area of the web.
So, lesson learned: everything can be of some use, provided you’re willing to look beyond the obvious and have a look at what’s lurking below the surface.
