Polytechnic

The personal brain-dump of Garrett Coakley

dConstruct 2022

Note: This isn't going to be a dive into the content of the talks at dConstruct 2022, Hidde has an excellent post that does a far better job than I could do, and the slides synced with the audio are up on Vimeo. This is more my thoughts on dConstruct itself, and what it means to me.

So, that being said…

November 2019. I’m sitting in a bar in Berlin taking a break between jobs, catching up on Twitter, and I see a post from dConstruct, it’s coming back for a one off event!

I message John, my soon-to-be new boss. “I’m going to this, I know I don’t work for you yet, but can I expense this?” “Yes” he replies (I'd worked with John before, so he gets me).

Cut to September 2022 (This is the montage point in the film). I’m sitting in the Duke of York’s theatre in Brighton, George Oates is the first speaker, and there’s a familiar photo on the cinema screen behind her.

George on stage at dConstruct 2022, in front of a photo I took of George and Denise at dConstruct 2007.
Georgeception - George Oates standing on stage at dConstruct 2022

“This is a photo by Garrett Coakley taken at dConstruct 2007”

Oohhhh. Right, that’s why it’s familiar. I took that!

(as an aside, if you’d ever told early 2000s me that one day I would get a small name check at dConstruct I would have fallen over laughing, so thank you George.)

George Oates and Denise Wilton on stage at dConstruct 2007
George Oates and Denise Wilton on stage at dConstruct 2007

I have a long history with dConstruct, I think I’ve only missed one in the original run from 2005 - 2015 (but to confirm that that I would need to go digging in the loft to find all my lanyards)

It’s where Tom Coates elegantly explained how we were designing for a web of data, not pages.

Where George and Denise had a fireside chat about how sites were more than just their pixels.

Tom Scott gave a talk about the future, without slides.

Ariel Waldman showed what citizen science can achieve.

It’s where I spent nearly 2 hours at an after-party bending Denise’s ear about how cool humpback whales are after getting a new job at WDC (sorry about that Denise).

It was the event that formed the developer I am today, it’s where I made friendships that survive to this day.

dConstruct was about the big ideas, but not in a wanky TED way. It was about ideas on the horizon brought into focus, it always left me wanting to know more.

dConstruct was never about the big showy thing that will make you millions. It was about the interesting. It gave you seeds to take away with you, and that’s important.

More important than ever in this landscape of web3 and dall-e and the ever accelerating pace of change, we need a place where we can pause a moment, hold out our hand with the seed we have, and ask, what do you think of this?

I think there’s still a place for dConstruct, and I will miss it terribly.

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