I'm unsure if it was a conscious  decision, but the over all theme seemed to be how our world is becoming  Gibsonesque. From the opening keynote with GPS enabled bees to the closing keynote where James Bridle discussed render ghosts and how technology is trying incredibly hard to understand us and how we are seeing our world more and more through technology's eyes.

I attended a few great technical sessions, but think I got more value from the big picture sessions. 

I can't say which was the best session, the ones that affected me most profoundly were How to be a Web Sorcerer with Dmitry Baranovskiy and Lanyrd: From side project to startup. They were quite different talks but talked in very human ways about their two topics.

I went to Dmitrys talk to have my pants scared off by a javascript genius and instead got a wonderful talk about not being afraid to fail and not to suck. You suck, by not trying in the first place. 

Natalie Downe & Simon Willison gave a wonderfully frank talk on Lanyrd inconveniently taking off whilst they were on their honeymoon. 

Relly Annett-Baker explained why it is the little bits of copy that we all ignore that are the very import bits to those who don't spend their day in our world.  The threat of having your genitals feed to a shredder also gives you great focus.

John Allsop concreted my preference for applications being web based rather than native in his talk The Dao of Web Design Revisited

I think the biggest thing that web directions has done is to rejuvenate my enthusiasm for the industry in which I work. Which was getting dangerously close to caustic.

Hopefully the venue will also have Dyson airblades as the hand dries were ineffectual, yes that is the only negative thing, I liked the food and liked the fact we didn't get bags of conference bin fodder. I don't need yet another conference bag, kindle Fire or any other non iOS tablet however... 

Thank you Maxine & John for a wonderful conference. 

I am remiss in mentioning the wonderful opening titles by Cameron Adams.