First up was Peter Paul Koch, probably the only person who is referred to by his initials; by himself, but also among others. PPK is the owner of Quirksmode.org and a guru on the topic of JavaScript. PPK's talk about unobtrusive JavaScript had a low footprint, of which I believe it may have been a bit too low considering the audience. His enthusiasm however was very inspiring. PPK first covered the importance of separating structure, layout and behavior. Next he described assumptions a developer often makes but should refrain from. An example would be the presence of a mouse as an input device. This particular statement was quite an eye-opener for me personally and I'm very sure that each individual in the audience learned at least something new.

The next speaker to take the stage was Jilles Oldenbeuving, who leads development for the very popular Dutch website Marktplaats.nl. Jilles wanted to give us a look 'behind the kitchen' of Marktplaats. This was probably a speako but it actually covered the talk well. Let me explain: consider the server park and data management to be 'behind the kitchen', applications and databases to be the kitchen itself and last but not least the frontend output to be the cute waitress serving steaming meals. Jilles' talk was interesting but mainly focused on scalability. I couldn't help but notice that most attendees would have preferred an extended look inside the kitchen.

After a short coffee break the stage was cleared for Ibuildings' very own symfony prophet Stefan Koopmanschap. Stefan gave the crowd a live demonstration of symfony's sexiest features (code generation) and with that he managed to leech at least a few souls into the depths of this fullstack framework. Although confronted with some technical difficulties, Stefan's talk was well organized and interesting to follow.

Last but not least two gentleman climbed the stage. Stephen Hay (Cinnamon Interactive) and Robert Jan Verkade (Eend) presented their talk in a refreshing tennis-inspired match between Webstandards on one side and a random website (in this case Hyves) on the other. They showed us how they managed to make Hyves efficient and accessible by rearranging and refactoring the HTML and CSS output. Game set and match!

When the talks were over we gathered in the lobby for drinks and socializing, after which we crossed the street to enjoy a delicious Chinese buffet. All in all it was a great day and I'm already looking forward to the next.