So another great Sencha Con is over, and I'm left to reflect on everything that went on over the last few days. This time was easily the biggest and best Sencha Con that I've been to, with 800 people in attendance and a very high bar set by the speakers. The organization was excellent, the location fun (even if the bars don't open until 5pm...), and the enthusiasm palpable.

I've made a few posts over the last few days so won't repeat the content here - if you want to see what else happened check these out too:

• Day 1 Wrapup
• The Making of Fastbook
• Ext JS Performance Tips

What I will do though is repeat my invitation to take a look at what we're doing with JavaScript at C3 Energy. I wrote up a quick post about it yesterday and would love to hear from you - whether you're at Sencha Con or not.

Now on to some general thoughts.

Content

There was a large range in the technical difficulty of the content, with perhaps a slightly stronger skew up the difficulty chain compared to previous events. This is a good thing, though there's probably still room for more advanced content. Having been there before though, I know how hard it is to pitch that right so that everyone enjoys and gets value of out it.

On Saturday I had the good fortune to be able to attend a conference entitled "Darwin, Humanism and Science", held at London's Conway Hall. For those not able to attend here is a short roundup of what happened:

Richard Dawkins starts us off

The conference kicked off with a quick introduction from BHA President Polly Toynbee, after which Professor Dawkins took to the stage. His lecture revolved around the concluding paragraph of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which can be read online for free here (the relevant passage starts "Thus, from the war of nature ..."). Dawkins analysed each segment of the text in turn, giving us his insights into its meaning and slipping in some fascinating information about our modern-day understanding of evolution, such as how we know that all species in the world today must be descended from a single progenitor.

The professor left some time for questions at the end of his lecture. He had commented on the lamentable state of the public's understanding of science, proffering the alarming statistic that some 18% of the British population believes that the Earth orbits the Sun once a month (presumably we go around faster in February), which lead me to ask him what we can do to combat this. His answer was to "get out more".