Whisky Web Conference
12 - 14 Apr 2012 at The Hub

Did not feel like a first time, short notice conference. Pretty sure you guys can count this as a massive success. So, onto stuff that hopefully can be even better next year:

* Felt a bit rushed in the morning. Joe had already started the intro while we were coming in and then the coffee wasn't available until after the first talk was done. Coffee at the start definitely a must.
* Better Internet connection options... I know this is a balance between price and it's normally fine because I can use 3G, but there was barely any reception in the venue. Maybe some kind of booster is a possibility?
* Hehe, like it says above - you definitely didn't need to apologise for what you didn't manage to do, we totally would not have noticed.

So, thank you for all the effort and hosting. will absolutely be back again.

Really enjoyed the day and would attend if it's run again next year.

Things I liked:
* Well organised - there was no hanging around wondering what was going on.
* Good range of speakers pitched at a range of expertise levels.
* Friendly atmosphere - there wasn't the elitism found at some conferences.

Things that I thought could be improved on:
* £50 was very cheap - I would have been happy to pay more!
* Limit the talks to 45 min - a full hour was a bit too long.
* Better description of talks. The summaries would have been fine for a single track but weren't really detailed enough to make an informed decision between the two tracks.

I think that with shorter talks there could be more of the general interest talks in a single track and then use a shorter twin track to cover the more technical talks.

Congratulations to everyone involved in organising this, you should be very proud of what you achieved.

Great conference - especially since it was put together in a short timeframe by a group of people who had never run a conference before. I thought the venue and the atmosphere were very good - as were the opening and closing keynotes. However, some of the talks were a bit lack lustre and key web technologies like Ruby, Python and the MS stack were underrepresented. Maybe running formal tracks would have help. Also, I thought the opening and closing talks on how the conference was organised were not really needed and came across as unnecessarily apologetic.

This was a great opportunity to learn. The selection of speakers was very impressive, and the talks I attended were all interesting.

All credit to the organisers for making it happen, especially at such short notice.
For me, as a local (and a Scot), the low price made it a "no-brainer" to attend at my own cost
(for that price I didn't expect lunch and dinner to be included too).

Well done and thanks to the various sponsors (including Joe) - you deserved the unashamed plugs at the end of the day !

I hope it will happen again next year.