The San Francisco Expression Engine/CodeIgniter conference wrapped up earlier this week, so I’m back in Chico doing my best to catch up on client work and personal projects.

I had mentioned previously that this event was going to be the first conference I’ve attended, and I found it both enjoyable and rewarding. San Francisco weather stayed nice the entire time I was there, so I was able to walk around San Fran and explore the city in addition to attending the conference. I had the unique opportunity to meet a wide range of people with varying skill sets and vastly different backgrounds, from other freelancers to CEOs and creative directors. Being able to talk face to face with some of the people I only knew online via Twitter was extremely rewarding.

The conference was held over three days at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The first (optional) day was filled by a variety of Expression Engine and CodeIgniter based workshops. I attended Burak Guzel’s masterclass, where we put together a CodeIgniter powered URL shortening service over the course of about eight hours. This give me the chance to see how someone else puts together a web application, and it was encouraging to see that others build CodeIgniter applications the same way I do. The final two days were taking up by a mix of lectures and workshops, including talks on design, development best practices and ecommerce.

The highlight of the conference for me was Simon Collison’s talk on “Subconcious Design” on the first day. Although perhaps design was a odd topic considering the audience full of programmers, I thought his comments on reducing complexity in design were important to note. I enjoyed seeing the graphic design concepts I’m learning about in college being actively applied online, and I hope to expand on this topic in a blog post soon. Simon Colison’s presentation files are available on SlideShare.

EllisLab, the developers behind Expression Engine, also launched MojoMotor, a small light-weight publishing engine designed for clients who want a CMS that is easy to use and doesn’t need fancy features. Although MojoMotor doesn’t have an official release date, take a glance at a preview video at mojomotor.com.

I have also just recently launched both mojomotorlayouts.com and mojomotorplugins.com, which will eventually contain MojoMotor layouts, plugins and resources. I'm unfortunately not part of the beta program, so those sites will fill with content after MojoMotor officially launches.

This conference has inspired me to move forward on several personal projects (and maybe even start a couple new ones!)  I really enjoyed meeting a variety of new people and continuing to work on my web development knowledge.