Following Friday's coverage of the Head Conference, I've got some more rambly thoughts. Jeremy has a post up, for a start. 
I didn't see many of the talks yesterday because of a certain member of the family having a panic and needing someone to calm them down and get them to think rationally. I saw most of the sessions on Saturday though, and here are some impressions.
Stephanie Booth gave a personal talk on freelancing, organising conferences and other potential brushes with failure. There is so a business opportunity for a nerd talent manager, matching up the suit people to the command-line people.
The next session I went to was Thomas Vander-Wal's Seeping through the Garden Wall which, I have to say, I wasn't particularly impressed with. It was very business analysis but didn't actually have much in the way of case studies. I'm glad that nerd tools, created in frustration at the complexities of the corporate enterprise toolset, are now being turned into corporate enterprise tools. It'll prompt some innovation as the nerds who were once happy with some hacky wiki written in Perl or whatever will rebel once it becomes a feature-ridden JavaSE monster. The horrific tragedy of Microsoft Vi comes back into vision.
I went to Cliff Hall's session on writing code that will last, and it was quite interesting. I wasn't sure I agreed with him. Sure, in the Flash/Flex space, or in web apps, or even in some commercial desktop apps, code won't last tremendously long periods, but code in open source that works gets pretty immortalised. gcc has been around for a long time, and will probably not be going anywhere quickly.
Next up was Molly Holzschlag's talk about standards. Tremendous fun - although the chat did become (with my assistance) a bitch-fest about IE8 and it's lack of support for XHTML and so on.
Derek Featherstone gave a good talk about accessibility and Ajax, giving some broad principles on how to make Ajax accessible and talked about some of the things coming up like ARIA roles in HTML 5.
I took an hour out to have a meal. I then logged back on for Lynda Weinman's talk about online education, which I found interesting but over-optimistic. Universities and classrooms aren't going away, and they are often the best place to learn for a lot of things. I think that while we may be able to train Photoshop users in a browser window, I'm rather sceptical about doing the same for physicists, philosophers and Presidents. Horrific visions of University of Phoenix-esque distance learning/online education scams come to mind. That's not to say there aren't plenty of things wrong with the various levels of the education system that need fixing very quickly. If I didn't believe that universities still have a role to play, I wouldn't be going to one.
Yesterday, I managed to sneak out of family commitments to catch most of Leeky's talk about Git, the chat for which devolved quickly into some truly horrific puns about forking and rebasing. I wish I could have seen Ben Segal's talk, Simon Willison's talk and John Sheridan's talk. I guess I'll have to wait for the videos to come out.
One thing I would like to see next year would be a BarCamp-style anyone-can-present track. Half an hour each, running parallel with the rest of the event and anyone who has got a ticket can run a session. Plus it would have been neat if, after a session, the chat could be 'spun out' into a separate 'hallway' area. In general, the discussions were - no thanks to me - very good and the format of having a built-in backchannel worked really well.
Very enjoyable, and a big round of applause to Aral!
