I have been attending this year’s Future of Web Apps Expo in London’s ExCeL centre.
There were a ton of interesting speakers and I enjoyed listening a lot. Amongst others there were Steve Souders of Yahoo (High Performance Web Sites), Paul Graham of Y Combinator (The future of web startups), Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com (The architecture of WordPress.com, he was the only one to go into some detail) and Kevin Rose of digg (Launching Startups).
I also enjoyed Robin Christopherson’s talk very much. He is vision impaired and showed how he browses the web (amazing how fast he had set the speed of his screen reader — I know why and guess that most vision impared people turn up the speed, yet it still feels awkward to listen to it) and which challenges therefore arise. Unfortunately Chris Shiflett only held a workshop which I was not attending.
The conference was clearly not so much for developers (at some points I would have greatly enjoyed some delving into code), so I am trying to keep my eyes open for even nerdier conferences :) Any suggestions?
On the evening of the first day there was a “live” diggnation recorded which was pretty fun.
According to Ryan Carson, he will be publishing audio files of the talks on www.futureofwebapps.com soon. Thanks to Carsonified for installing this great conference. I hope I will be able to return next year.
I have posted more photos to flickr.