The ninth Reboot wrapped up in Copenhagen on Friday. It was a really enjoyable experience for me.
This was the second year I attended so I had a good idea of what to expect. I remember sharing many of Andy’s frustrations with the philosophical nature of the presentations last year. This year I was positively wallowing in the blue-sky thinking—it made a nice change from the usual tech conferences I attend. Warning: Reboot should only be taken as part of a balanced conference diet.
With that said, I did find myself gravitating towards the more technical end of the spectrum of talks: Anne and Håkon both gave fairly meaty presentations on the tools of our trade: markup and CSS. With my tech appetite satiated, I was able to enjoy the more hands-off stuff a bit more.
I was really looking forward to hearing Leisa’s talk but a last-minute impromptu discussion of OpenID, microformats and portable social networks meant I had to give it a miss. It was, by all accounts, excellent. Methinks we have chosen wisely for dConstruct.
There was a lot of talk about social networks. Most of the discussions were psychological in nature but it was gratifying to see that a lot of people are sharing my frustrations and getting behind the concept of portable social networks using OpenID and XFN.
The nice thing about Reboot is that it can act as a platform for talks that are unlikely to show up on the agenda of a more commercial conference: Stephanie’s talk on multilinguilism and Tom’s discussion of energy consumption, for example.
Reboot had an almost Barcampesque feel to it at times. The micro-presentations and five-minute demos were especially fun in an ad-hoc kind of way.
Mostly, as with all the best meatspace events, the real pleasure came from meeting people. Some of the highlights of the conference involved sitting outside in the Danish sunshine chatting with smart friendly geeks. I had a lot of fun catching up with the great people I met last year as well as adding rel="met" to:
…and many others who were most excellent company and provided me with a surplus of inspiring conversations.
Even when the conference itself was over, I was luckily enough to share the plane ride home with some fellow geeks… fellow geeks also called Jeremy: Jeremy Ruston and Jeremy Stone. To avoid confusion, let’s address the latter by his geological nom-de-plume Jem Stone, the name under which he wrote a nice write-up of Reboot on the BBC website.