Avid Web Developer

Well, day one of the IW3C is over. Though getting 3 hours of sleep before waking up at 3:45am to leave at 4:30am isn’t quite the same as Christmas morning, it was well worth the trouble to beat traffic in both Calgary and Banff.

To my surprise, Banff’s main street was under construction. Lucky we, Peter and I, left early, there wasn’t a single vehicle in our way. We got around to the hotel we were staying at, the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Our hotel room wasn’t quite ready for us to check in, so we hanged out at the registration table until more people started to show up.

Now, the actual conference didn’t start Tuesday. Monday was for the pre-conference tutorial for Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design. The 3 key speakers were:

Bebo White
Departmental Associate (retired) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

David Leip
Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at IBM.

Brent Norris
Web consultant who surfs up with his clients in the morning, then getting down to business in the afternoon in his tree house in Hawaii

After the all day tutorial, we were given a chance to take the WOW - no, not World of Warcraft - Web Professional Certification Exam. It was fairly challenging, and they even said that “professionals” would find the exam challenging. There are 2 purposes I saw the exam for. The first being to separate those who think they know web development/design (folks who design myspace pages and call themselves web designers) from those who truly understand how to use markup languages and so forth. Hopefully I did good, but nonetheless to meter my knowledge and understand where I can improve.

Nothing much happened after the exam. We just picked up our conference tags and a backpack full of goodies such as a water bottle. Actually I plan to use those as a give-away prize in the next Napkins & Donuts meeting, which I have to present my experience at this conference with the rest of the technology department.

Now, the best part of the day was not finding 2 small twin size beds in our room, but the grilled - not fried - calamari at the Ramsay Lounge. That was tasty, along with the spaghetti I had for dinner. But when you fall short of the bill’s total at a luxurious hotel like that, you tend to forget your class in society.