Lunch'n'Learn with the Amsterdam Java User Group

I’m in the Netherlands. Last week was running some presentation training with a group at Info Support in Veenendaal, the weekend was catching up with friends in Amsterdam, and tomorrow I’m speaking at a student conference in Utrecht. One of the things about travelling for a living is that there’s no such thing as “out of office”, and the Todo List doesn’t stop just ‘cos you’re away for a week or two. My schedule said that today I’d be preparing examples and demos for a Zoom masterclass I’m giving on Thursday with the folks from Tech Cornwall.

So when I got an email from Geertjan Wielenga, who runs the Amsterdam Java User Group, asking if I wanted to do a lunch’n’learn session, I naturally said “no” - mainly ‘cos I’d already have left Amsterdam for Utrecht. But, as Geerjan pointed out, the two cities are ridiculously close together… so I decided, what the hell. Usually, when I do in-person events, I bring something that’s prepared and polished: talk, slides, video… you know. What some folks call a “Dylan Talk”. Today, we did the complete opposite: all I brought with me was a list of topics I’m still working on, and after sandwiches and coffee in Geertjan’s kitchen, we spent a fun hour putting together demos, learning about the weird and wonderful edge cases of modern web standards (did you know border-radius can have EIGHT different values? 🤯)

Here’s a few links to the stuff we looked at:

• Organic blobs in CSS with border-radius at bram.us

• The HTML <dialog> element at MDN

• The story of #rebeccapurple

and the code from the session is all up on GitHub:

• https://github.com/dylanbeattie/modern-web-dev

Fun session. And a nice reminder that not every tech event needs to be rehearsed and polished - sometimes all you need is people, coffee and curiosity.