This was FOWA Expo 2007

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I have been attending this year’s Future of Web Apps Expo in London’s ExCeL centre.

There were a ton of interesting speakers and I enjoyed listening a lot. Amongst others there were Steve Souders of Yahoo (High Performance Web Sites), Paul Graham of Y Combinator (The future of web startups), Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com (The architecture of WordPress.com, he was the only one to go into some detail) and Kevin Rose of digg (Launching Startups).

I also enjoyed Robin Christopherson’s talk very much. He is vision impaired and showed how he browses the web (amazing how fast he had set the speed of his screen reader — I know why and guess that most vision impared people turn up the speed, yet it still feels awkward to listen to it) and which challenges therefore arise. Unfortunately Chris Shiflett only held a workshop which I was not attending.

The conference was clearly not so much for developers (at some points I would have greatly enjoyed some delving into code), so I am trying to keep my eyes open for even nerdier conferences :) Any suggestions?

On the evening of the first day there was a “live” diggnation recorded which was pretty fun.

According to Ryan Carson, he will be publishing audio files of the talks on www.futureofwebapps.com soon. Thanks to Carsonified for installing this great conference. I hope I will be able to return next year.

I have posted more photos to flickr.

fowa, fowa 2007

High Performance Web Sites, a book by Steve Souders

I’d like to introduce you to this great book by Steve Souders. There already have been several reports on the Internet about it, for example on the Yahoo Developers Blog. There is also a video of Steve Souders talking about the book.

The book is structured into 14 rules, which, when applied properly, can vastly improve the speed of a web site or web application.

Alongside with the book he also introduced YSlow, an extension for the Firefox extension FireBug. YSlow helps the developer to see how good his site complies with the rules Steve has set up.

I had the honour to do the technical review on this book, and I love it. Apart from some standard techniques (for example employing HTTP headers like Expires or Last-Modified/Etag), Steve certainly has some tricks up his sleave:

For instance he shows how it is possible to reduce the number of HTTP requests (by inlining the script sources) for first time visitors, while still filling up their cache for their next page load (see page 59ff).

The small down side of this book is that some rules need to be taken with care when applied to smaller environments; for example, it does not make sense (from a cost-benefit perspective) for everyone to employ a CDN. A book just can’t be perfect for all readers.

If you are interested in web site performance and have a developer background, then buy this book (or read it online). It is certainly something for you.

The book has been published by O’Reilly in September 2007, ISBN 9780596529307.

Some more links on the topic:

high performance web apps, steve souders