Future of Web Apps – Miami

For the past three days I was at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami Beach, FL. Overall I thought it was a great conference.

The conference started on Monday, with registration, demos, eating, drinking, and networking. This was supposed to be on the beach, but it was ‘cold’, windy, and raining so it was inside. I arrived a little late and made it just in time to register and hang out for a while.

The real deal started Tuesday, which was a day full of speakers. Overall it was a great speaker line-up with a good mix or marketing, motivation, and technical topics.

On Wednesday I participated in two workshops. The first workshop focused on Facebook Connect, how to use it in an application, and how not to use it. It was led by a former Facebook employee so there was a lot of useful information given out.

The second workshop I went to covered the basics and not so basics of jQuery. I have been using jQuery for a little while now, so the actual content wasn’t that useful for me. The session was led by John Resig, who created jQuery and still leads the group that develops it. It was amazing to see how well he used it and learn some of the techniques he used. I walked out feeling like I needed to rewrite everything I have ever written in in jQuery. John also used a really cool slide deck, which was actually just a big web page that he manipulated using jQuery. This setup allowed him to demonstrate the features without having to flip between the browser and powerpoint.

When I wasn’t at the conference I had a great time in Miami Beach, meeting a lot of interesting people. It is always inspiring and humbling to hear about some of the cool things that people are doing on the web.