Matt Andrews

Twitter's #ukopenhouse London - my notes

25 Apr 2012

Last night I attended the first of Twitter UK's Open House sessions on their engineering work. It was a free event at LBi's London office and sold out very quickly. I managed to get tickets and went along, with little idea of what to expect, but quite excited to hear from the makers of Bootstrap, whose work has been inspiring my own work at the Guardian. Here are my notes (written to circulate amongst the rest of the Guardian's client-side team) from the three talks.

Please note: these writeups are my personal opinion and not my employers', and I was sitting right at the back so any inaccurate statements are probably my fault and not the speakers'. Probably.

1. Dan Webb (Twitter) - "pushState or bust"

2. Tom Woolway & James Whittaker (Tweetdeck) - "Blackbird: One codebase to rule them all"

3. Jacob Thornton & Mark Otto (Twitter) - "Bootstrap: Defender of the universe"

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Well, that's pretty much what I got from the evening. I enjoyed the event and was grateful for Twitter for putting it on. Perhaps it's unfair to mentally compare the Bootstrap talk to the kind of thing you get at paid-for web conferences, although I went to the (also free) LondonJS meetup just last week and this was much more beneficial: lots of code examples, well-produced presentations (by the seasoned pro Jake Archibald) and I came away feeling I'd been both educated and entertained instead of just one of those things.