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Fronteers 2011: extraordinary

Fronteers 2011, held last Thursday and Friday, was an extraordinary web conference. Where the previous three editions were good and could easily compare to the best international events, Fronteers 2011 was better. The upcoming videos will prove it.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences, and organised four. The ones I organised, and more than half the ones I visited were good, most others were not so good, but a few were extraordinary. Fronteers 2011 belongs in that select group.

And the wifi worked flawlessly with 450 simultaneous connections!

The quality of our line-up was what made the conference so very excellent, and it had nothing to do with me. We selected the speakers by vote, and Peter Beverloo and Krijn Hoetmer handled all practical matters.

Although I was involved in all stages of the planning, I did little hands-on work until the conference itself, when I was floor manager once more and handled general conference flow.

Fronteers acquired a core of volunteers that’s able to pull off a first-class conference without me doing all that much. Better, we sold all 500 tickets without me doing any form of marketing here on QuirksMode. I’m delighted that my brain-child was adopted by the Dutch front-end community, and that it has built up such a great name. It doesn’t need me any more. It can stand on its own legs.

I’ll remain part of the organisation in the future. There’s a substantial overlap with Mobilism 2012, which will use the same venue and mostly the same personnel. I’m going to use Fronteers as a dress rehearsal for Mobilism, and vice versa. Never pass up a chance to practice.

For me personally, three sessions stood out:

• Aral Balkan’s opening session “The Future is Native.” I feared he would start up the boring native vs. web discussion again, but my fear turned out to be completely unwarranted. Instead, he made a careful, deliberate case why native development will remain important, but also stressed that it’s the end result that counts for the user, and not the technology. And he’s such a good speaker. It’s a pity I missed part of his session due to organisational demands.
• Alex Russell’s “Web Components and Model Driven Views,” where he gave intriguing details of Model-driven Views, which promises to be a perfect templating model for web developers. During his session my subconscious started to nag me about combining this exciting new technology with W3C Widgets, and I found myself dreaming up continuous streams of JSON-ified data being captured and templated by local HTML5 apps in order to ... well, do awesome. I’m hoping my subconscious will eventually tell me more. It sounds interesting.
• Seb Lee-Delisle’s delightful mobile experiment, where he connected his laptop to about 235 mobile devices in the audience, and showed he could generate synced output, and even patterns. Despite his host application not holding up when the time came to determine the location of all devices (in order to form complex patterns), he offered us a fascinating glimpse into the future.

Incidentally, Seb’s presentation would have been impossible without the superb conference wifi supplied by Event Engineers. At the height of Seb’s experiment the wireless network effortlessly handled about 450 simultaneous connections, and the round of applause for that feat of engineering was well-deserved. I unreservedly recommend Event Engineers for all your conference wifi needs.

Thanks to our speakers for making this event; thanks to our attendees for enthusiastically participating; thanks to my fellow organisers and volunteers Isaac Andela, Peter Beverloo, Will Fris, Vasilis van Gemert, Justin Halsall, Krijn Hoetmer, Anne van Kesteren, Harold Leewis, Jelmer van der Linde, Edwin Martin, Wes Oudshoorn, Thijs Reijgersberg, Hidde de Vries, Koen Willems, Peter van der Zee, and Frank Zijlstra for doing their part of the job.