I recently attended the “Future of Web Apps” conference organised by the friendly guys at Carson Systems. It very much consisted of ups and downs, I think I’ll just summarise as follows:

Ups:

  • last.fm talk: in depth history, tech talk, passionate guys who really enjoy doing what they’re doing

  • openid: it’s there! basically everybody that matters in the world is now behind it, yay!

  • soocial and social: the guy from soocial.com gave a talk that was a breath of fresh air, but really my best bit of the conference was meeting up with friends and heading to the pub afterwards

Downs:

  • no free wifi: no free wifi, no free wifi sniff (stupid BT; Ryan - if only you’d told us more straight away)

  • odd mix of talks: looking back at the speaker list I’m sure that more than half of the talks should have been ok, but that’s not the experience I remember, I think a non-techy focus simply left some talks missing depth

Also, as I mention in the title, I got to meet Rasmus Lerdorf the creator of PHP. The first 5 years of my working life were spent building Content Management Systems using PHP so I was quite glad to meet him (in fact I told him that he’d “made my career” though I may have meant it a little tongue-in-cheek). I shook his hand, name dropped Stig Bakken (who used to work for my parent company and with whom I had maybe 2 IM exchanges) and told him a little about my past use of PHP. Don’t know if it meant much to him, with Stefan of moo fame thanking him for the past 10 years of PHP I doubt it did, but I’m happy I met him anyway.

To finish off, I couldn’t talk about FOWA without linking through to Stuart’s excellent notes from the days. I’ve already used them a number of times to remind me of things I heared.

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