Josh gives a thorough roundup of the Interaction ‘17 event he co-chaired.
“I think I’ve distilled what this conference is all about,” Jeremy Keith quipped to me during one of the breaks. “It’s about how we’ll save the world through some nightmarish combination of virtual reality, chatbots, and self-driving cars.”
February is shaping up to be a busy travel month. I’ve just come back from spending a week in New York as part of a ten-strong Clearleft expedition to this year’s Interaction conference.
There were some really good talks at the event, but alas, the muti-track format made it difficult to see all of them. Continuous partial FOMO was the order of the day. Still, getting to see Christina Xu and Brenda Laurel made it all worthwhile.
To be honest, the conference was only part of the motivation for the trip. Spending a week in New York with a gaggle of Clearlefties was its own reward. We timed it pretty well, being there for the Superb Owl, and for a seasonal snowstorm. A winter trip to New York just wouldn’t be complete without a snowball fight in Central Park.
Funnily enough, I’m going to back in New York in just three weeks’ time for AMP conf at the start of March. I’ve been invited along to be the voice of dissent on a panel—a brave move by the AMP team. I wonder if they know what they’re letting themselves in for.
Before that though, I’m off to Porto for a week. I’ll be teaching at the New Digital School, running a masterclass in progressive enhancement:
In this masterclass we’ll dive into progressive enhancement, a layered approach to building for the web that ensures access for all. Content, structure, presentation, and behaviour are each added in a careful, well-thought out way that makes the end result more resilient to the inherent variability of the web.
I must admit I’ve got a serious case of imposter syndrome about this. A full week of teaching—I mean, who am I to teach anything? I’m hoping that my worries and nervousness will fall by the wayside once I start geeking out with the students about all things web. I’ve sorta kinda got an outline of what I want to cover during the week, but for the most part, I’m winging it.
I’ll try to document the week as it progresses. And you can certainly expect plenty of pictures of seafood and port wine.