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Future of Web Apps Summit : A Review

I’m back in chilly Newcastle after a wee trip to London for the Future of Web Apps Summit. It was a great event and (despite the hours wasted away on trains and tubes), I felt it was well worth the time and effort. The topics covered during the summit were pretty varied, but basically centered around the latest technologies and practice of building a web app. Here’s a quick review of the talks —

Joshua Schacter (del.icio.us)
Excellent opening talk by Joshua Schacter. A bit on the geeky side, but I think most of the audience enjoyed this. His fascinating insight and tips on dealing with a large-scale web app had the audience frantically collaboratively editing. Possibly the plainest slides I’ve ever seen for a talk (I think these were mainly prompts for Joshua), but his narrative was spot-on.

Cal Henderson (Flickr)
The lead architect behind Flickr offered a more user-friendly approach to the workings of a large-scale webapp. Started getting really geeky when talking about Unicode, but quickly reined it in. The most interesting part of Cal Henderson’s talk was about APIs and how important is it to Flickr (e.g. for desktop apps like Flickr Uploadr and iPhoto plug-in).

Tom Coates (Yahoo)
Tom comes across as quite a witty and friendly guy, and delivered a fun and entertaining talk. He also seems dangerously obssessed with URLs, and spent quite a bit of time evangelizing the notion of a good URL. Highlight of Tom’s talk was a spoof app — Astronewsology — but also raised important points about services, APIs and page layout. Funky slides too.

David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals, Ruby on Rails)
Got big whoops and cheers for claiming that “PHP is the devil”. Not strictly true (everyone knows Java is the devil), but he had a good point. DHH’s talk centered around some of the syntax and structure of Ruby on Rails. Having not really played with RoR much, I was impressed by the apparent simplicity of it, so I guess DHH’s talk had the desired effect. He has quite a brash confrontational manner, which may rub some people up the wrong way, but to me he made a lot of sense and delivered one of the best talks of the day.

Shaun Inman (Mint)
To be honest, I think the guys before Shaun stole his thunder a bit. His talk was about the the API used with Mint, and the overall benefit of having an API, but most of this was already covered by Cal Henderson. This meant Shaun rattled through his slides really quick with plenty of time to spare. To his credit he opened up the floor for questions, and did an admirable of job of fielding them. Also funny to note Shaun’s point that not supporting IE helped him avoid having to deal with customers who had no right to be using it in the first place (or something along those lines).

Andrew Shorten (Adobe Flex)
Although basically a sales pitch for Flex, I found Andrew Shorten’s talk pretty interesting. I didn’t really know much about Flex before but the demo showing a shopping cart seemed pretty slick. Interesting alternative to Ajax, but I still find myself shivering when working with Flash.

Ryan Carson (DropSend)
Ryan is obviously well-experienced when it comes to talks. He comes across very confident and has a nice relaxed manner. Ryan covered what it actually takes to get a fully-fledged web app up and running. Kudos points for showing the actual costs involved in DropSend (turns out it cost around £25K). Very useful talk for anyone serious about a web app.

Steffen Meschkat (Google Maps)
Steffen is one of the guys involved with Google Maps, and, as you’d expect, is an expert in client-side technologies like Ajax, CSS and DOM scripting. I don’t know if it was Steffen’s thick German accent, or the high-level tech talk, but I didn’t really follow much of what was going on here. Having said that, he had a excellent sense of humour and endeared himself to the audience — Über-nerd!

Posted 4 years, 5 months ago