Differently from other Javascript conferences, Full Frontal is supposed to be a one day conference that everyone can afford to go to. It happened in Brighton, a beautiful, small city in the South of the UK.
Remy Sharp is the one who managed the big crowd of over 300 geeks that met that Friday. He received a lot of help from his wife @Julieanne who supports his great geeky ideas.
The conference opened it’s doors at 9:30 in the morning which was a bit harsh for me, dealing with the previous night hangover. Lucky for me I stayed in a nearby Travelodge hotel that was at a 5 minutes distance from the venue.
There was a big crowd at Duke Of York’s already when I arrived at the registration. Everyone was happy to meet familiar faces once again and to share stories about their projects, weird code, ninjas and Web.
In a couple of minutes we proceeded to the main room where all the talks were held. It was a big cinema room with confortable chairs which everyone was really happy about 
Remy opened the conference, explaining what everyone should do and not do and also announced the speakers. He also brought the sad news that there is no internet at the conference 
The first speaker was Jeremy Ashkenas, the father of CoffeScript and Backbone.js. As a new version of CoffeeScript was coming soon, he presented the new goodies that this amazing language is providing. I was happy to see that a lot of people in the room were already using it (including me :p ). His conclusion was that languages that compile in Javascript make your life a lot easier as a developer and you should not be afraid to use it.
After a 15 minutes break, Phil Hawksworth told us about Excessive Enhancement and how we can get overloaded today with all the fancy tools around us on the Web and use them wrongly.
Marijn Haverbeke, an awesome guy from Amsterdam, presented his well-known project – CodeMirror. He is also the author of the Eloquent Javascript book – a very good one. The unique part of CodeMirror IDE is that it has an API that you can use everywhere. You can grab the slides from here.
After a break, Nicholas Zakas, who worked at Yahoo! and has a couple of books on Javascript, told us how to structure a Scalable application with Javascript. After his talk I started to have some doubts about my previous frontend apps architecture.
Around 14:00 all the geeks went to eat. We found some crappy food with average, expensive English beer in a pub nearby. But the point was to meet new people and discover more about their Web toys, right?…
Rik Arends, the CTO of Cloud9 IDE, shared his knowledge about the massive architecture of the IDE. His advice on how to scale Node apps and how they deal with a massive amount of requests and data were extremely welcome. Cloud9IDE is growing fast and I was surprised to see that a lot of people in the room were already using it (including me :p ).
Glenn Jones presented his amazing projects and how to play with drag and drop between browsers (even IE). Browsers are not totally prepared yet for exchanging data on drag, but it’s worth to give it a try.
Brendan Dawes is a creative director that came to the dev conference to open our eyes and pay attention to things around us, beyond our geeky, cyber life. He explains how weird and unordered things inspire and challenge him.
An amazing talk by Marcin Wichary closed the conference. He is the guy who stands behind the Google Doodles development. It’s very challenging to make those little scripts that should run fine in all browsers and load very fast. Usually there is no elegant solution to do it, so you should do what you gotta do – use hacks to fight the browsers. The most popular Doodle is Pac-Man.
After the conference everyone went to a party where there was a lot of alcohol, with the aim of sharing the impressions about Full Frontal 2011 and, once again, the stories about their projects, weird code, ninjas and Web…
Ah, yes, and here is a picture of the famous Brighton Pier:
Brighton Pier
