Web Hours (spletne urice) is a series of web related talks that is happening weekly here in Ljubljana and is free for everyone. Today’s talk , happening on sixth anniversary of the first , will be 181th. A lot of people shared a lot of knowledge and our community has grown from a handful coming to first few talks to few tens of regular attendees. We never made a really serious effort at counting, but I would be surprised if few talks haven’t drawn close to a hundred people. My congratulations and thanks to all who made it happen!

I started Web Hours on Andraž’s suggestion because I was not happy with  the quality of work done in Slovenia and I thought regular web talks could educate and help raise awareness. Looking back at the state of industry then and where we are now, it is obvious we came a long way and I’d like to think our talks played a part in it. I may be biased, but not that much because I stopped organizing them a long time ago so kudos really goes to those who followed me .

It is still easy to find shoddy work , but this will never change. You can find it in any field and there is no reason why web should be any different. There is always room for growth, but I am fairly satisfied with Slovenian web development community. These days there is no shortage of interesting events (meetups, hackdays, camps of various kinds) where you can meet kindred spirits, many of whom are doing interesting stuff. I wish there was more open web evangelism, but talks always were what we made them and it’s up to us open web advocates to go out there more often.

On the other hand Slovenian UX community depresses me. It seems to be full of people with big egos, very limited knowledge and low self-esteem resulting in an environment where constructive criticism is avoided and learning remains personal and, as community, slow. There are exceptions to this, but right now it seems it is enough to read a couple of books and follow a few related blogs to justify a UX related title on your business card and profess expertise. Critical assessment of problems and approaches is largely missing. There is a difference between cutting corners and skipping all steps — being agile is not a justification for being lazy. Events are rare and online discussions feel limited to regurgitating blog opinions as facts and discussing eternal, but mostly answered questions (e.g. how much of underlying technology do non-developers need to know?).

Then again I may be just an old grump. My feelings about UX community are not all that different to what I felt about web development community six years ago and that one turned out OK. Maybe I am just too quick to judge and things will turn out just fine soon enough. We’ll see. See you tonight in Kiberpipa .