Derek Gallo

The Future of Web Apps in Miami has past. I found the event a great opportunity to learn from some of the industry tops as well as socialize and network with industry peers. I attend many conferences but usually I am working at them, providing kiosk technology for their attendees. They are usually not conferences for my profession, so to go to this one as an actual attendee was great.

Besides just the main Future of Web Apps conference, the Miami community hosted BarcampMiami. Barcamp is a community driven un-conference where anyone can choose to give a presentation or talk on whatever they feel and contribute to the overall knowledge of the community. BarcampMiami was held on the day before the main conference day and was a free alternative to the FOWA workshops.

Don’t miss our own second BarcampOrlando in April! Registration is already open.

I found both events to be incredibly educational and valuable but some presentations really stuck out:

Barcamp

How Not To Fail At Web Services - Gregg Pollack

Gregg gave a good presentation on implementing REST web service architectures. He didn’t get into the details of how to implement a web service call. Instead, he explained how to do it the CORRECT way. He gave examples of sites that have failed and others who have got it right such as the OpenSocial API. Every time Gregg speaks I feel like I come away with an exact understanding of what he talked about. He is very articulate and brings the points in well.

Agile devellopment w/ respect - Ed Toro

Ed’s presentation was all about Scrum development. Scrum is a procedure NFi has taken on recently and we LOVE it. The kicker with development methodologies is that you should take them more as a guidline and implement them in a way that works for you and your team. Ed outlined the basic features of scrum and how he has used them in the past. I took away some good ideas on how to change our own implementation a little bit. The biggest point of his presentation was the respect factor. We should all try to remember to treat each other with respect and trust our developers to get their jobs done.

Inventing - Brad Neuberg

This session was all about coming up with ideas. Brad is pretty much the originator of the co-working, aka cow-orking movement. Brad ran his session in a manner that would make Alex proud because it was more of a discussion than a presentation. A Key point taken from that session was that if something makes you uncomfortable then there is probably room for a good invention because that means it is most likely something “new”. Other points taken away were some techniques on generating ideas:

Sacred Cow Technique

Take 2 opposite ways of doing things and mix them. An example would be the Green Industrial Revolution. The Green Movement and the Industrial Revolution are on opposite sides of the spectrum but this combines them to produce a greater good.

Cranky Inventor

This one is pretty common. Listen and take notes on what people are complaining about the most and then just come up with something to fix it.

FOWA

Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

Kathy Sierra is a unique speaker. She is engaging and isn’t shy to use her own style. She teaches valuable lessons but throws in just enough comedy and even cursing to keep the crowd interested and remind you this isn’t a college class lecture. Kathy is all about geting developers to remember who they are creating software for. We need to think about and if at all possible, physically see our users reactions to using our software. Only then will we truly be able to make it easy for them. She also pushes us to make our software more human. So many developers forget that to a user, its not about the tool itself, but about what the tool can do for the user.

The Architecture of Wordpress - Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg, in case you didn’t know is the founder of wordpress.com. He is extremely young and looks like he is just out of high school yet he is running one of the highest traffic sites on the internet. More impressively was with how little resources he was able to make this site scale. He outlined the exact structure of wordpress.com and they only have a total of about 19 servers. For a site that probably ranks around 5th on the internet in traffic, thats pretty impressive. Adding to the list is that the entire company is only about 19 people. Matt is truly a gifted individual and very transparent with how he achieved his sucess not just on the sides of scaling the technical platform but how to scale the business and the community around your site.

The Future of APIs - Kevin Marks

This talk was really all about Google’s Open Social and Social Graph API’s. Kevin Marks works for Google and is a main driving force behind these api’s. These two api’s will be the center of the social networking universe. They take opposite approaches to help solve the same problem. People are starting to belong to more social networks than friends they have in those networks. Google’s apis aim to help social networking platforms come together and combine all the data so users aren’t being so repetitive in filling out all their profiles. These will require all of social platforms to adopt the conventions. The larger players already are though.

The Application of New Features to an Established Application - Cal Henderson

Cal Henderson is a top engineer (didn’t catch his exact title sorry) for Flickr. He is absolutely hilarious! I have never seen anyone take a topic as boring as processes in the software development lifecycle and make them absolutely entertaining. He talked about the different tools you should employ such as source control, regression testing, etc. I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know but it was really great to get confirmation as to many of the techniques we use that are also employed by a top player such as Yahoo. I really want to find a video of this presentation to show to my team.



And that was that! Some other things that were part of the general theme of FOWA Miami were the use of Open ID, oAuth and Google’s social apis. Nearly everyone touched on why we should adopt these and why we should all contribute back to the community and keep our advancements open. We at NFi have every intention to integrate with all three of these as well as contribute anything we develop that is worthwhile.

After the conference was an after party at Nikki Beach Club. Everyone showed up and it was a great time. We got to talk with some of the speakers as well as hang out with some of our colleagues from Orlando. All in all, I had a good time but now I feel like I have a ton more work to do!