Recap: Refresh the Triangle

Last week we hosted the inaugural meeting of Refresh the Triangle at our Durham office. As promised, here's a quick recap of the event:

• Turnout was fantastic. About 28 people came, which was double what we hoped to have. As you can see from the photos, we were pretty much at max capacity!
• Jackson Fox presented some very helpful methods for building user-centered web applications even on tight money and time budgets. He shared both inspiration and practical tools. His slides are available on slideshare.
• A quick show-of-hands poll showed that a little more than half of the attendees call themselves developers, a little less than half call themselves designers, and several people identify as firmly in between. This is exactly the balance Refresh is all about.
• Viget’s own Jackson Wilkinson was down from HQ for the day. As one of the coordinators of Refresh-DC, he shed some wisdom on what it takes to grow a large, thriving Refresh community.
• People were engaged – there was some great Q & A after the presentation and a big group of people went to Alivia’s afterwards to continue talking.

Based on what I saw last week, it looks like Refresh will flourish in the Triangle. It's very cool to be a part of something that kicks off with so much momentum. Visit Refresh the Triangle to learn more or make suggestions for future topics, and if you're in the Triangle, we'll see you soon!