It’s been several weeks since I had the pleasure of visiting Milan, and joining 150 enthusiastic web developers for a day of server-side frameworks and JavaScript. Lucky for me, I keep good notes.

Overall the day went smoothly, with some solid logistics and very attentiveorganizerss, and an impressively diverse audience drawn by the fact that the event was ambitiously run in English.

This was great in that it drew a truly pan-European audience (11 countries were represented on the day, and at least 1 visa had to be procured to get someone there!) It was trouble because, in some cases, it pushed speakers outside their comfort zone.

Thankfully, despite a slightly rocky start, every session I attended was very well presented, and the consensus on the day was that the speakers were excellent. While I felt that a lot of the speakers had more that they wanted to cover, the topics were well-chosen, every room constantly had a stack of people in it, and all the sessions were pleasingly focused on code & demos.

For all that the language barriers occasionally made networking a little challenging,organizerss Simone & Ugo nailed the logistics. Registration was slick, lunch was plentiful, and session management was great.

The very generous Rui was kind enough to showcase a short video about Glimpse in his session, which seemed to go down well (Although the audio in the rooms was a little under-powered). Because I think you might need a mid-week chuckle, here are some out-takes.:

And lets not forget the Hackathon. The idea was what having just learned about a stack of interesting technologies, attendees could spend an evening (fuelled by pizza and some good Github beer) hacking something together using them. Unfortunately, after a (great)10-hour day, and in many cases facing international travel in the morning, many of the attendees headed straight for their hotel rooms. This idea could work so beautifully, and I’m excited to see how it pans out in 2013.

On top of the slick sessions, getting to finally meet Ugo and Simone in the flesh as a pleasure, as was the serendipitous introduction to the most excellent Rui. They’re all fantastic guys who are passionate about the web, and I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to work with them.

Simone & Ugo put on a great event, and I’m excited to see what they do next year.