Realtime Conf 2013 just finished in Portland. It was an unusual conference in many ways. The “production values” and effort the &yet team put into it were simply astounding. The conference included, amongst others, a book, a play, a marching band, boxes of dirt, meth samples, and a beautiful song (skip to 3:50).

All the videos are online. These are my three favorite:

Isaac Schleuter: Leadership and open source: Also known as “Z”, he is the main author of npm and leader of the node.js community. He teaches leadership in tweets, around a core philosophy of empathy, compassion, and grit. If your life involves having to interact with humans, I’d recommend this talk.

Ilya Grigorik: Making HTTP realtime with HTTP 2.0: HTTP 2.0 is the next version of HTTP. It is based on SPDY. It could be ready as early as next year. And it’s way cool.

Eric Rescoria: What WebRTC is good for: He wrote much of Firefox’s WebRTC implementation, and some of Chrome’s, so if you want to learn about WebRTC, watch this.

The best part for me were the conversations (especially with the XMPP folks) and how generous everyone was with their time and explanations.