Tonight I went to the montana programmers meetup at RightNow tech. Since I quit working at freewebs.com three years ago, I've been kind of doing my own thing in isolation, with the occasional conference to get my nerd out for a week a year. Its neat to see the other projects people have going on in Bozeman.

Tonight's session was "design for programmers", its an interesting topic since it seems like now days the developer/designer line seems to be blurred. I know I have been doing my own design for quite a while now.

I think one thing that all of the web development crowd is excited about is HTML5 and some of the new CSS features, typekit.com was brought up. From what I've read it seems that they have worked with google and open sourced some of their infrastructure (which seems like a strange business choice). So their scripts and backend front processing lets you use the @font-face css tag in all of the browsers. This even works in IE5 and up, and degrades gracefully for any previous browsers, though it sounds it will work for most everyone.

Someone also mentioned fontsquirrel.com which seemed to be similar to typekit, but free. I will definitely be checking it out over the next few days.

Phillip also talked about the specifics of their interactions with clients, which was interesting to hear.

All in all the meetup went well and was informative. The more meetings we have the more I realize that Bozeman has a lot of programmers and designers, it just needs more opportunities for us to get together.