met the makers

By anders pearson 07 Nov 2002

yesterday, <a href=”http://www.columbia.edu/~zm4/“>zarina</a> and i went to the <a href=”http://www.meet-the-makers.com/“>meet the makers</a> conference.

since we got in for free, i’d say it was definitely worth the price of admission. i wouldn’t really have paid much for it otherwise.

most of the conference was product demos by various software companies like netomat, IBM, adobe, atomz, and macromedia. they all left me less than excited.

the panel discussions were ok though. they interviewed one of the developers who works on <a href=”http://www.zagat.com/“>Zagat.com</a>. he was pretty boring, but he was immediately followed by Joshua Davis from <a href=”http://www.praystation.com/“>praystation</a>. for the last few years, he’s been working mostly in flash and so i haven’t really been following his work very closely (since macromedia hasn’t released a flash 6 plugin for linux yet, praystation is just a big gray box in my browser) but i remember being blown away by his webdesign back in the day. Joshua is a former pro skateboarder, is covered in tattoos and loves to swear (afterwards i overheard him asking a friend “so, do you think i said ‘fuck’ enough times?”), so it was fun to watch him being interviewed by a guy in a suit.

the real highlight though was a panel discussion on web standards with <a href=”http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/“>eric meyer</a> from netscape and <a href=”http://www.zeldman.com/“>jeffrey zeldman</a> of the <a href=”http://www.webstandards.org/“>WaSP</a>.

there was pretty decent free food too. i felt a little bad though because, being the first day of ramadan, zarina was fasting and couldn’t enjoy any of it.

didn’t really do too much actual meeting of makers unfortunately. i did meet <a href=”http://www.pixelcharmer.com/“>tanya rabourn</a>, who is very cool. but she works for Columbia (in a different department) and knew zarina already, so i don’t know if that really counts.

Tags: webdesign conference