David J Rice

So I’m out here in the London Docklands for the Future of Web Apps conference, so far it’s been entertaining and information packed. Managed to collect a couple of titbits from the talks today.

Steve Sounders from Yahoo gave a great talk based mostly upon his book “High Performance Web Sites”, great ideas on performance tuning a Web Site with a slight slant to focusing on the front end rather than the traditional back-end tuning. I’ll definitely be taking this approach in the future.

The man behind Ajaxian.com Dion Almaer presented about the beta software Google Gears, which looks to be a neat way of taking web applications offline. Though admittedly it looks like in the current form it’s only really suited for a number of applications (a-la google reader), might look at this again as I know I’ll be needing it soon with a forthcoming start-up.

Robin Christopherson gave us half an hour in a visual impaired person’s shoes, really inspirational. Seeing someone use a computer in such a competent manner without the use of sight, it has totally changed the way I view accessibility. Google appear as a role model for the industry whereas other giants like Amazon have a long way to go.

From Pownce, Daniel Burka showed everyone how to interpret user feedback in the short and long terms. An interesting insight into the patience and analysis required when dealing with waves of feedback after a big product lunch.

Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg talked through some of the architecture of Wordpress. For me the main takeaways were his thoughts about hiring in particular, the attitude that it’s good to say no. “If you have any doubts about a specific hire, just walk away. You didn’t need them yesterday so you can do without them tomorrow.” Probably not a direct quote but you get the picture. Hiring is the most important for a new start-up and it’s crucial to get it right. Another gem was also about specifically targeting particular segments of your user base with adverts. Instead of showing them to everyone they took the approach to showing them only to the small amount of users that are once off visitors coming in from a search engine. Great idea, keeping revenue and CPM up there whilst not spoiling the user experience for loyal visitors.

Matthew Haughey talked about his experience building a community with MetaFilter unfortunately I didn’t really get anything useful from this talk.

Heidi Pollock from bluepulse showed us how crazy designing for mobile browsers is at present, with some good practices for staying at least partially sane. Her last jab about iPhone web interfaces being ridiculously easy had me in stitches, with such a myriad of real mobile platforms to design for, getting an iPhone version out isn’t exactly a big accomplishment.

John Reisg gave people a brief look into what the future holds for Firefox, Javascript and a whole kit and caboodle of other tricks. Great stuff, I’m really looking forward to some of this. Especially IronMonkey, which is an attempt to enable coding Javascript in Ruby using the Tamarind engine donated by Adobe to the Mozilla Corporation (yes I’m still parsing that too).

Kevin Rose (you know who he is :)) ran through some of the lessons learned from launching Revision3, Pownce and oh yes of course Digg. Very interesting, totally struck a chord with his comments about the importance of starting small and bootstrapping than going the VC route straight off the bat.

After the serious stuff the whole conference was treated to an electric live recording of diggnation, Kevin & Alex were totally on form (aided slightly by a variety of import brews). Yes, hilarity did ensue. Followed by a bit of a party thrown by carsonified, did someone say free drinks? Good times. More tomorrow.