The Future of Web Apps, in review Thursday evening, 9 February 2006

The web page says 'One-day conference focusing on the development technology you’ll be using tomorrow'. Well, the short of that is that you'll be using Ruby on Rails and an API! To be honest I had mixed feeling about the whole conference. Just to give my thoughts on some of the speakers - Tom Coates, who i'd never heard of before, was pretty cool. Crazy, energetic and generally mad for it. I think he was only beaten in audience enjoyment by DHH who came out with some great lines such as “... PHP is the devil”.

Then there were some suprises. Shaun Inman was short. I mean, he really was a short guy, I had always assumed he was tall! Also, the presentation part of his presentation took 15 minutes out of the 45. I wish he’d been asked to speak on UI or Experience rather than APIs. Steffen Meschkat on the other hand was long, 10 minutes long and spoke high level geek the entire time. Probably the hardest to digest though I did learn some cool techy stuff. Lots of rantings about the standards and how ajax is to desktop apps what pop music is to opera.

As someone who’s never launched my own web app I really enjoyed Ryan Carsons talk about how much it costs to set up one and how to go about it. His top five tips at the end were:

  1. Don’t spend money unless you have to
  2. Barter for services
  3. Cut features
  4. Be realistic to pessimistic about cash flow [take a realistic estimate and cut 40% then see if you’re still in business]
  5. Plan for scalability but don't obsess about it

Another pretty funny one he came out with was don’t spend £1000 on stationary when you’re an online company, it’s dumb! I guess it’s good to laugh at yourself sometimes.

Networking opportunities weren’t fantastically great, despite around 800 people being there. If you did come to this site via the wiki though, please head over to my recently updated portfolio! I guess that about wraps it up.

 

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