It’s the opening Monday morning and we arrive at The Westin Chicago not quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed – it was a long flight – but definitely raring to go. The venue is perfect; its large main hall housing around a thousand people and offering excellent lighting, acoustics and wi-fi. Meanwhile, food and hot drinks are regularly topped up in the large lobby area and there are plenty of opportunities to mill around and chat to fellow attendees.

Over the course of three days we meet a range of lovely people from varying backgrounds: UX designers, visual designers, front-end developers, javascript coders, marketers – you name it, they're there. It’s fun to hear about others’ jobs and skills, to find out to what extent people’s roles are hybrid or specialised, and to chew over the similarities and differences in how we do things.

We also get the chance for a brief chat with some of the speakers. In particular it was great to bend Jason Grigsby’s ear about responsive images – he’d already been a great help from afar with his ten-part post on the subject – and to talk CSS variables with Eric Meyer.

However the main event was the opportunity to sit back and listen to some of the best thinkers and practitioners working on the web today.

Our notes (and to-dos) from the various talks are too long to fit in a single post so we’ve split them up. Check them out below, and hope you enjoy.