Paris Web – Working in the now

Yesterday I was one of the speakers at Paris Web and my talk was “Working in the now”:
[slideshare id=749394&doc=workinginthenow-1226584706289320-9&w=425]

Originally I meant to talk about HTML5 goodies and how to simulate them with Flash and DHTML right now (writing a small abstraction library) but seeing the latest rounds of crashes and layoffs I changed my stance and talked about things that we could be doing now to both secure our jobs and not lose all the momentum the standards movement got in the last few years.

I’ve explained the reasons and my thoughts on the subject in detail in another post here. In the talk I advocated re-using components and systems we already have to work faster, deliver better and have less hardware and software overhead in doing so.

These are:

• Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
• CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
• Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
• Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
• Page widgets (things that HTML doesn’t have): YUI, jQuery UI
• Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
• YouTube API
• Amazon S3 for storage
• Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
• Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
• Mechanical Turk

The feedback so far was great, but there was also a lot of “yeah this is open source, but what if the company running it goes down and how can I trust it” questions. I will write something longer abut this soon, it is just very interesting to see that there is a big problem with free things and trust.

Tags: creditcrunch, css, maintainability, opensource, paris web, parisweb, pw2008, reuse, savingmoney