We brought in a handful of guests to join us at the MIX conference, one of whom was our good friend Morten Rand-Hendriksen, whom you may know from his work designing gorgeous sites or perhaps from meeting him at last year’s Make Web Not War in Montreal. He’s an interesting guy with interests ranging from metal guitar to photography to ballroom dancing to performing Rihanna numbers at karaoke bars, and that diversity of experience is also reflected in his work, what with his mixing of open source technologies and using tools like Expression Web. In fact, he’s an Expression Web MVP.
Having come from the world of open source programming languages and technologies myself, I know that too few people spend much time in each other’s worlds. The open source geeks tend to stay in their own camps, and ditto for the .NET nerds. We thought it might be an interesting learning experience to invite Morten to MIX and immerse him in the most suitable-for-him conference: after all, this is Microsoft’s most web-centric, designer-oriented gathering.
His impressions so far? Pretty good, from the sound of his most recent blog entry, titled MIX11 – Day One Recap. Here’s the “money excerpt”:
Not to sound like a crazy cheer leader or anything, but the future looks bright. Or to put it in my own humble terms: Microsoft has seen the light and is accepting what we have known all along: Web standards and open source is where the future lies.
You can read the whole thing over at his blog, Design is Philosophy.