Just had a great time visiting Front End 2010 in Oslo. The event was compact and the quality of the people there was amazing. I want to especially mention the great conversation I had with Molly Holzschlag, Paul Boag and Daniel Burka about getting perspective on your life in this 24/7 connected world we live in. Fascinating. 

On the talks, the whole event was just stocked full of wonderful insight and vision. I loved Aral Balkens (@aral) talk on The Art of Emotional Design. I heard Aral for the first time at Future of Web Design in London and once again he gave a totally inspiring talk on how to connect and design for humans. Try to create a non-human entity that can communicate like a human - its tough to do that, but Aral was able to show what impact it has when you really try.

Paul Boag (@boagworld) walked us through how to get sign off on the projects we undertake and I think that he was able to really break it down to just 3 key elements - time (or not enough of it), delivering multiple concepts rather than just focusing on one really good one and being confident about the role we play when serving our clients. It was really insightful stuff and I have already started thinking about how we can change our approach internally to use some of his thinking.
Molly Holzschlag held our hand through the garden that is HTML5. She was really able to point out the things that are important about the new standard and how they are connected to some of the other important changes going on, like the intro of CSS3. I want to say that I was really impressed how Molly battled on despite the technical challenges with the display equipment in the room. 

Dan Rubin (@danrubin) covered how to make the prototyping experience easier and faster. This one was a little bit more challenging for me, as I think some of the stuff that Dan presented is obsolete when compared to what we can do with HammerKit, for example. The basic idea was to create a background image prepared in Photoshop rather than code the HTML, and Dan has a point that it is faster to do it the way he did it - but it is even faster in HammerKit ;)

Kwame Nyanning from Adaptive Path was trying to connect the role he plays in his organisation with that of the central character in heist movies. I am afraid to say that this talk just went over my head - I could not get the point he was trying to make at all. If it is that you need to be tough, decisive, insightful and able to execute a plan, then fair enough - if it is you need to be mean, violent and rude, then not for me. I don't think I am of a sensitive nature, but Kwame was a little too raw for me at that time of the day.

Finally, I want to shout out to Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) - he is just an awesome person and so talented it makes me sick. His talk on how we should learn to focus on doing stuff that matters is just what I believe as well. Enough of making demos of spinning wheels on fire in HTML5 - create some kick-ass forms and features instead that can help to convince the people who hold the pursestrings that it is time to move to next wave of technology because it will really help them.

Hello to Wolf from Hotgloo - our paths seem inextricably linked! Thanks to all of the great people I met in Oslo and thanks to IXD for their hospitality. I look forward to taking forward our chat about how we can help you!

Signing off from Oslo.