FOWA Miami 2009
This post was written by derek on February 27th, 2009. Filed under Carsonified, Conferences, featured
In a blaze of glory and a whirlwind of a travel schedule I attended the Future of Web Apps conference in sunny Florida this week. As my schedule shows no signs of slowing right now, I will give you the short of it, with every hope of divulging full details in the near future!
Backstory
In an amazing and lucky chain of events and due to the help of twitter, I secured a free pass to the conference and a place to stay. You see, Matt Propst, @propstm had some unfortunate luck this year in this fine economy of ours, and lost his job. He tweeted that he was running a contest to give away his ticket as he would be unable to afford the travel expenses of attending. The contest was in hopes that it would generate a bit of buzz and get him a lead or two for some new work. I entered and won (I may have been the only entrant, sadly).
Next up (this was about 2 weeks out from the conference), I realized I needed a place to stay, as I am not made of money either. I tweeted that I was going as a last minute thing and wondered if anyone had a spare couch or a room they would let me crash in, and as my luck would have it Jonathan Bradley, @jonathanbradley, responded and saved the day! He even picked me up at the airport (delayed flight and all)!
The Trip
I work for ‘the man’ *cough* IBM *cough* and thus I have to ration my vacation time… being that, I took 1.5 days of vacation to go to Miami for a conference, leaving from Rochester Minnesota at 4pm on Monday and landing back here at 12pm on Wednesday.
My flight out of RST was about 10 minutes late, nothing too bad, got to Chicago (ORD) and my flight there was already delayed by 30 minutes (this was still ok, since I didn’t have to sprint over 2 concourses to make it), but then the delay just kept lengthening… The plane that we were to take just came in from an international flight and couldn’t clear customs for some reason, we finally boarded 1.5 hours late.
This put me in Miami at 11pm EST, I felt bad that Jonathan had to be inconvenienced this much, but am very thankful that he picked me up! We got back to his place, about 30 miles north (near Fort Lauderdale) and crashed out for the night. The next morning we got a little bit of a late start and then I saw the greatest traffic I’ve ever witnessed. Miami in the morning. Wow. It took us nearly 2 hours to go those 30 miles… but we made it!
The Conference
The man behind the curtain himself, Ryan Carson, and myself.
Due to the traffic and lateness we regrettably missed Ryan Carson’s opening remarks and Jason Fried’s “Getting Real 2.0″ (if you haven’t read the 37signals book “Getting Real”, Do It NOW!).
Next up we had a great talk from Dion Almaer of Google and Ben Galbraith of Mozilla about the Future of the Browser, so many amazing things are coming our way. Here’s to hoping we aren’t 10 years out from seeing some of it (I’m looking at you IE)!
Nothing too notable about the Open Strategy :: Applied talk by Dan Theurer of Yahoo!, could’ve been that his presentation didn’t work…
Joe Stump and Daniel Burka from Digg and Myself
Right after our morning break we had Joe Stump of Digg telling us how we can Scale our Team, so many great points from that talk! Will definitely keep in close as things hopefully progress with SocialSift.
Not much to mention on Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic’s talk about web copy and why yours sucks… she mostly used it as a pulpit to push her personal agenda. Which don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with her wanting to get more women in technology and speaking, but she should’ve had a foundation or a plan. Don’t just state a problem and expect the world to solve it for you, not if you’re truly passionate.
Update:
If you look below (comments area) you will see that Kristina responded to this post. I will address some of it here and some down in the comments. I was quite tired and it was about 3am when I finished this post. I did forget to mention something from her talk.
After her initial presentation about copy, she had Ryan Carson and Chris Messina on stage to do an open discussion of the topic of “Futore of White Boys” and “Too few women are on the speaking circuit and in technology in general”. Their tentative solution, or jumping off points are:
- Tag speaker ideas and offers with #fowaspeak
- Tweet and blog the challenge TODAY
- Ask speakers about how they got started
- Support your friends to speak up!
Now on to the comment response below (scroll with me).
Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs, Myself, and Jason Fried of 37signals
Aza Raskin took the stage next and I being the huge nerd that I am just so happened to have his father’s book “The Humane Interface” in my bag. Aza is the Head of UI Design for Mozilla Labs and he gave a great talk called “Order from Chaos - Future of the web”. Really great stuff, per the usual, high level and thought provoking!
Facebook told us how to allow the users of our sites and web apps to be more social with Facebook Connect. Made some good points, but in my case, with all the reading I’ve been doing, they were things I already knew. Seems like a great guy though.
After lunch was the Phizzpop Design Challenge, some ridiculous ploy by, you guessed it, M$. Only 2 teams (although there were supposedly 3) competed to win an all expense paid trip to SXSW! I really wish I would’ve known about it, I would sell my soul and develop a silverlight demo site for that sort of reward. All that said, Team Phenomblue of the design agency of the same name took home the “gold”. They had an interesting take on the challenge and presented what was basically a 401K for personal space travel, genius!
Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software, StackOverflow, and more notably FogCreek Software gave a presentation on how to achieve team nirvana. I personally look up to Joel, but I really disagreed on some of his takes on personal work ethic and hustle. One thing I will not disagree on is how he takes care of his developers at FogCreek!
Next up, we had Alex Hunter of Virgin speaking about “Brand 2.0″. I was confused when I first heard that he / that company had a speaker at the event, but he nailed it! He had some great points about how you need to really be cautious about what you put out there and what is associated with your name. People, not just media, controls what you’re viewed as in this world.
The Game Changer! Francisco Tolmasky of 280North
After our final break of the day, we all had our minds blown and our pants slightly moistened, by Francisco Tolmasky of 280North. He announce an open source book that they’re doing with O’Reilly, which is HUGE, but nothing compared to the bomb he dropped next. You MUST go to check out this demo video, go ahead, I’ll wait right here.
Now, wasn’t that incredible! I cannot wait for this to come out and am eagerly and rather impatiently awaiting the beta! This. Changes. Everything.
Then Ryan interviewed Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky about what makes them tick and how they became successful. Two very different guys, who pretty much disagree on everything. I, like I said, love Joel and what he’s accomplished, but my thoughts were siding with Jason on pretty much everything. He. Just. Gets it.
Garyvee gets in close! Such a great man!
Lastly, and in no way, shape, or form, least, We had, Gary Vay - Ner - Chuk! He completely killed it, bringing the passion and the true thunder that only he could! I came out of it ready to take on the world with nothing but a number 2 pencil and my whits. I was completely humbled and honored to meet him and that he recognized my name from the likes of Twitter, Seesmic, and WineLibrary.TV.
I met a ton of people, had a great time, and will hopefully write more later (even though this is 10 times longer than I originally intended).
Keep an eye on my Flickr stream, down there, as I will be uploading my tons of pictures as the days go by.
Next up: TechStars for a Day in Boulder next week. Maybe see some of you there!
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