Render Conference 2016

Last week I was in Oxford for RenderConf.

It was brilliant.

Render conference is two packed days of technical front-end talks from a seriously awesome line-up of speakers.

And when they said awesome, they meant it. Go check out the schedule!

My top three talks (in no particular order) were:

Val Head (@vlh): Designing meaningful animation (about web animation from Disney to CSS bezier curves)

Ashley G. Williams (@ag_dubs): If you wish to learn ES6/2015 from scratch, you must first invent the universe (Computer Science theory, Picasso and teaching)

Frederik Vanhoutte (@wblut): Rendering the obvious (Rainbows, categorisation, and Beethoven’s exploding head)

Between these three talks alone there was creativity, practical advice, inspiration and a call to change how you look at the world. Across the other 17 talks you could get everything from demoscene coding in WebGL to how to use the <canvas> element to print a new scarf. There was a really great range of presentations.

All the talks will apparently be available on http://lanyrd.com/2016/renderconf/coverage/ shortly, and the videos will be on Vimeo. My photos, which are mostly of the nice things I saw in between talks because I was too busy listening, are on Flickr.

As well as being an exciting, inspirational conference though, the whole thing was just executed really, really well. Regular breaks, pastries and drinks, retro gaming (enjoying losing at videogames is my superpower), provided lunch, table tennis, skittles, 3D printing pens, hacking competitions and more meant there was always something to do and always someone interesting or cool to talk to.

There was a party at the venue on the first evening where the food even came to us – freshly-made burritos and pizzas from vans outside the venues complemented the wine, beers and alcohol-free options inside. Hats off to all the organisers!

I think my only complaint was that given this was my first visit to Oxford, I was disappointed to find out that not every single building is a 1,000-year old cathedral. Absolutely gutted.

Probably lucky though, I hear they have terrible wifi. See you next year, Render!