I don’t know about you, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s success­fully messed up my body clock but I don’t think I can blame anyone but myself for that…

So, I arrived in Brighton on Thursday night after a surpris­ingly trouble-free train journey. After check­ing into the hotel, I wandered up the road to Heist for the pre-conference social gather­ing. I met some new people, caught up with the usual suspects and gener­ally had a good time. We finished up at a random pub on the sea-front at about 3 a.m.

Just under five hours later, my alarm went off. I staggered downstairs where I self-served myself the biggest break­fast of all time, before wander­ing up to the Corn Exchange, venue for the confer­ence. A bit of fresh air did me the world of good, so I was feeling surpris­ingly wide awake by the time I got there. I grabbed the freebies, downed some coffee and got chatting to some more of the peeps before we were called into the auditorium.

The confer­ence itself was ace. We had talks from Jeff Barr, Simon Willison & Paul Hammond, Jeremy Keith (twice!), Aral Balkan, Derek Featherstone, Thomas Vander Wal and Jeff Veen. Various other attendees around the inter­net have dissec­ted each of the sessions so I won’t go into detail.

Obviously it wasn’t all perfect. Biggest problem for me was the lack of leg-room in the audit­or­ium. Maybe it’s just my bad knees?

The good stuff made up for that though. Aral’s “Mash my Flex up” presen­ted Flash to me in a whole new light. Derek Featherstone came up with a series of gotchas and examples of deeply inaccess­ible coding on some very high profile sites (hello Google Calendar). Finally, Jeff Veen stole the show (as per usual). It was one of his inspir­a­tional tour-de-force talks, leaving most of the audience think­ing “Yeah, this stuff is ace! Let’s go and build it, right now!”

Which of course we didn’t. After running off to drop off various laptops, bags and miscel­laneous freebies off at numer­ous hotels around Brighton, we all congreg­ated at The Terraces for the Snipperoo sponsored after-party. Alas, I missed out on the free-bar (which ran out in about ten minutes flat). That place closed somewhat earlier than billed, so a bunch of us went-a-wandering, eventu­ally ending up in Sidewinder. Again, I finally crawled into bed shortly after 3 a.m.

Just under five hours later, my alarm went off. I staggered downstairs where I self-served myself the second-biggest break­fast of all time, before check­ing out and wander­ing up to the station. After a surpris­ingly trouble-free train journey, I got home to find that I’d lost my house-keys and ended up climb­ing in a window. Utter genius. Where did they turn up? Bottom of my wash-bag. Go figure…

Of course one of the best things about the whole confer­ence was the backnet­work. I didn’t have to collect business cards from every­body I met. Instead I logged on, added them to my network (all done with XFN) et voila! I have their contact details. What’s more, it picks up people’s blog posts that mention dConstruct, along with any Flickr photos tagged with dconstruct06. Madgex, that was an inspired idea!