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Future of Web Apps Summit (be a snowflake)
Posted by tomriley Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:06:00 GMT
I was quite pleased with the future of web apps carson summit. Everything ran pretty smoothly. Most of the speakers were very good, although there was a lot of repetition (I think we were told to use clean URLs 3 or 4 times). There was also a lot of talk about building APIs. These are obviously good points but I think the benefits are well understood and I got the feeling that the speakers knew they were addressing a fairly clued up audience. Some case studies might have been more useful than lists of dos and don'ts. I would have liked to have heard about the problems that the guys writing delicious/flickr/google maps etc ran into along the way. Ryan Cason's talk was a bit more like this - an explanation of how Drop Send came about, what the budget was and how he spent his cash. I got the impression he hadn't been coding for a while - almost all the development was contracted out. The emphasis was on building web apps on a budget. In fact, I think the main thing I learnt was that you can't make much money doing contracted web development these days - he got some pretty good deals!
David Heinemeier Hansson's talk was very good. It was the most technical (code snippets!) but also the most philosophical. He tried to get to the heart of what makes programmers happy. Of course, we all know that using Ruby On Rails is the answer to this! :-) But what exactly is it about rails that makes us happy? It has a lot to do with how often you can be a beautiful and unique snowflake. That is, how often you can feel that you are doing something that hasn't been done a million times before or isn't being done by a million other people. David also talked about convention over configuration - one of rails' biggest strengths in my opinion - trade off some unnecessary flexibility for speed of development (and in-built encouragement to 'do the right thing'). Combine that, and many other great features, with all the potential of the Ruby language to produce very elegant code, and everyone can spend more time being snowflakes!
Update: All of the talks including the panel discussion are now available for download (as mp3s).