Yesterday I attended the second Digital Barn conference in Barnsley, once again held at the Digital Media Centre. I had also attended the first Digital Barn conference in February 2012, which had 80 attendees and a single speaker track. This second Digital Barn event had now grown to 115 attendees and two separate speaker tracks. Whereas the original conference had been free entry, this second event was now £20 per ticket, with early bird tickets available for £10.
The Digital Media Centre is a good event venue and is located just a few minutes walk from Barnsley train station. The venue is relatively new, with a main room that seats around 90 people and a smaller secondary room holding around 30 people. The Digital Barn conference was using the larger room for presentations and the smaller room for coding-led demonstration sessions and interactive group discussions. The event sponsors provided free hot drinks, cakes and biscuits all day, as well as pizza at lunch.
The Digital Barn is mostly a web development conference, so the majority of sessions were geared towards web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript as well as web design. The attendees were a good mixture of developers, designers, entrepreneurs and public sector workers involved in digital media. Besides Barnsley locals there were many attendees from Sheffield and Leeds, with others from further afield such as Birmingham and even Scotland. The conference atmosphere was friendly, with plenty of post-talk questions and people contributing in open discussions. The Twitter hashtag of #digitalbarn was widely used by attendees and tweets were shown on monitors in the venue, although unfortunately the hashtag was quickly hijacked by the usual spammers using scantily-clad female avatars.
The sessions I saw were quite varied, with topics such as CSS in large web sites, 21st century working, application prototyping with Twitter Bootstrap, mobile app development with Titanium, and a history of significant developments in the worldwide web. Some sessions were code-free and others involved live coding demonstrations of simple applications by the speaker. Although there were many good sessions, my favourite was “Big CSS” by @csswizardry. I came away having learned a lot and met some new people. My only criticism of the event is that 10am-5pm seemed a little short, so it would have been nice to have had an extra hour and one more speaker session. Another Digital Barn conference is planned one year from now, which I plan to attend based on the quality of this event.
