Tech Blog — John Keyes

Last Friday the wonderful FOWA roadshow hit Dublin for the first time. Liberty Hall was full to capacity as webby people gathered to hear what some of the brightest minds on the web had to say for themselves. Ryan Carson (the organiser, Carsonified) started things off with a brief introduction, and then talked about some of the lessons he learned while selling DropSend.com. Some nice nuggets in there but two points stood out for me. Register a company for each application/site as it makes the legal side of things much easier when you do go to sell, and DON’T write your own billing system (+1 +1 +1). Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor (Contrast) were next up and they were went through many of the conventions we currently follow on the web, how these conventions are applicable to magazine style sites, but not necessarily applicable to web applications. If you are following most of these conventions you are not designing, you are copying (I am a copier, arrrgghh!) and to make something remarkable you have to look beyond they conventions. The presentation was super, from taking a slash on the train, to that awkward moment when you’re not sure if you’ve scored with a French woman. An unconventional presentation to highlight their point. Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet) then took the reigns, and he highlighted many of the accessibility challenges facing impaired users. Most people without visual impairment have issues with captcha’s, well you should try them with your eyes closed. It was bloody awful. We laughed at how awful it was, but if we were faced with this for every site we signed up to we’d go absolutely mental. Plenty of food for thought here. Blaine Cook (Osmosoft) then talked about some of the lessons he learned from building twitter. I have to be honest and say that I don’t remember much from this talk, but I do remember that I enjoyed his delivery, and that he’d make a brilliant lecturer. Very laid back guy, with knowledge bursting out his ears, but maybe I was too relaxed and didn’t take enough in. Emma Persky (Trampoline Systems) then delivered a talk devilishly titled “The future is Ruby without Rails”. If any title was going to cause a riot at FOWA it was this, as the Rails troops were there in force. In fairness to Emma the title was deliberately cheeky, as she could have been talking about any framework. Her point was that you shouldn’t feel tied to the framework you are most comfortable using, sometimes it makes sense to look around and find a better fit. In some cases of course you will end up in bed with your favourite, but don’t dismiss others out of hand straight away without looking at them. I’ve thought about this a few times, but I can’t justify learning a new framework when someone else is footing the bill. I keep meaning to build a Rails app as that world is passing me by. Morgan McKeagney (iQ Content) then gave a very nice talk on the difference between a nice web app and a nice business. He used music and bands as the analogy and it worked really well. ( pity about the tie:-) ) Morgan also announced the iQ Prize—€10,000 for the best business plan for a web app. Awesome idea. Matthew Ogle’s (Last.fm) talk was focused on how desktop applications can power your web application. The key is to make it as unobtrusive as possible on the desktop, so the user doesn’t have to learn something new. Last.fm’s scrobbler being used as the example here. You don’t launch it separately, you don’t even need to know it’s there once you’ve it installed, it works when you listen to your music. Some staggering figures in relation to last.fm (800 scrobbles a second at peak!). Simon Willison then scared the shite out the audience as he shared some horror stories. Not of the blood sucking vampire variety, but of the click jacking, cross site scripting and the cross site request forgery variety. The place cracked up at the My Space hack author (who didn’t realise it would be so viral) who said “Shit, it’s exponential!”. I would be surprised if everybody didn’t go home thinking “I better fix that on our web app ASAP”. There was a break in the talks at this stage so three Irish startups could pitch their ideas to David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals), Mike Butcher (Techcrunch), and Ryan Carson. The three brave souls to present their ideas were Campbell Scott (IGOpeople), Anton Mannering (Udoogoo), and Robin Blanford (Decisions for Heroes). Campbell and Anton showed a few nerves with their presentations but provided solid answers to the questions that were sent their way. Robin’s presentation was polished and his ‘Basecamp for Danger, Google Analytics for saving lives and we don’t do A/B testing’ line was A+ material. Fair play to the lads for getting up there and doing it, they (and their apps) should benefit from the experience. The last talk was given by David Heinemeier Hansson, and the crux of his message was “Fuck the real world”. If you believe in what you are doing, if it’s simple, and if it can make money, and someone says to you that it’ll never work in the real world, then you have a shot at success. The main thing I took from this talk was that there is no point whatsoever in just having an idea. Ideas are cheap. If you don’t be the person who said “I had that idea ages ago…” or “That could have been me…”, then fuck the real world, and execute so your idea becomes a business. The talks were way more entertaining and informative than I’ve expressed here, but I hope it gives a bit of a taste of the event. The videos for the talks will be online and you can appreciate them in their full audio-visual glory.