Yesterday I spoke at Forefront Leeds a recent speaking event for frontend developers in the Leeds area, run by Russell Poulter of Flodesign.
Russ chose a great place for the venue. The Brewery Taps, which is only a short walk from the station.
There was really flexible format to the event, 3 speakers each has a maximum of 15 minutes to talk about anything frontend related, then some beers and socialising. It’s a format I found worked really well on the night and I met quite a few new people, I also found the talks were a great way for people who might be a little nervous to feel they could approach you and strike up a conversation, based around what you have just heard.
I spoke first on Structured Data, 15 minutes isn’t a huge amount of time to teach people too much so I concentrated on spending the time introducing people to the ideas around Structured Data, it’s concepts and the technologies involved, hopefully I gave some of the attendees a starting point for them to grow their understand and confidence in using Structured Data in the future.
Here are my slides if your interested
Next up was Andy Fitch of Parallax who gave a talk about the processes they use internally at Parallax. It always interesting to hear how others work and Andy did a great job explaining it all.
To close the talks, Paul Stantongave a great introduction to Bower Twitters automated package manager, which is a fantastic piece of software.
It was a great opening event, and a fantastic start to something I hope will go on for quite some time.