MinneWebCon happened on Monday and it was great! My friend, Bertine, and I spoke in the morning about our experience of being the first two front-end developers for Gage (an agency in Plymouth, Minnesota). We included many answers to questions we were always asked and other tips we found useful when working with a large team of back-end developers. Check out our slides and ask us any questions you might have!

We went to listen to Emma Jane Westby speak about component-based design (Drupal-y stuff) before our session. This is what the room looked like from the back:

And from the front! Yikes!

I should mention that before all of this awesomeness happened, I spent most of Sunday feeling totally run-down and flu-ish. I chalked it up to nerves, but there’s no way to make those kind of nerves go away! Going to a hockey game that night helped to distract a bit, but on Monday morning I woke up feeling just as ill.

I wanted to eat all of the breakfast pastries at the conference, but eating wasn’t in the cards. I was initially going to sit out of attending the first session but being alone in a giant quiet building for an hour? That would’ve been worse for the nerves.

And once we started our session? I felt magically fine. Adrenaline took over. The words just happened. I don’t remember much of what I said, but we had rehearsed the day before so I’m hoping I copied myself pretty well. Our audience was quiet at first, but we started handing out goodies and they warmed up. And we had great questions! We made it through most of our slides (we had added some bonus topics to bring up after the formal discussion had ended, just in case) and hopefully helped at least a few people get some new tricks to make their development easier.

I rewarded myself with cheesecake during the lunch break.

The box model explained! #FEDev #minnewebcon pic.twitter.com/TrbGfY0Qqr

— charismaticdog (@charismaticdog) April 14, 2014

Just went to a great talk by @bertine and @pork_chop on front end development, can't wait to use some of these tips in my code! #MinneWebCon

— Brian John (@brianpjohn) April 14, 2014

And from my coworker, Bruce (who is visible in the photo from the front of the room):

Let us now praise St. Paul colleague Amy Berg, who was among the presenters at Monday’s conference. With her friend Bertine Buchan, Amy took us through front-end development for back-end developers. Quite frankly, I couldn’t tell you the differences among inline, block, and inline-block display without looking it up, but I know now. Amy, I appreciate it.

Warm fuzzies, all around!

Would I do it again? Heck yes. In fact, Bertine and I have submitted this topic to That Conference and I’ve submitted an entirely different topic to both That Conference and CSSDevConf. Fingers crossed! If I get to have a ‘next time,’ I hope I remember to take a few days off afterwards.

Thank you to Bertine for being a great co-presenter! Thank you to MinneWebCon for giving us the opportunity!