Innovating the other web – my keynote at WROC#

Last week I was lucky enough to give the opening keynote of the inaugural WROC# event in Wroclaw, Poland. The event, organised by Objectivity was aimed at Microsoft stack based developers and I felt incredibly out of my depth. In essence, I was the Microsoft employee who had much less knowledge about the subject matter than the audience.

I took the opportunity, however, to tell this sort-of-captive audience about the massive need we have in innovating “the other web”. The web these developers work on day-to-day, the web of large corporations on Windows machines who get functionality from framworks, see the front-end as a complex thing to tame and are beholden to browsers that should have been replaced years ago.

My talk slides are on Slideshare.

I also recorded a screencast of the talk and uploaded it to YouTube.

Resources I mentioned in the talk:

• Comscore report on mobile App usage
• Can I use? – showing you the current capabilities different browsers
• Making it easier for Enterprise customers to upgrade to IE11 and Windows 10
• Forrester research paper on the financial benefits of upgrading browsers
• Windows Insider program to test-drive Windows 10
• Request features in Project Spartan or IE11
• Current capability and browser compatibility status of IE
• GoChat showing just how many animations you can put on a single page
• Webpagetest.org to test for and fix performance problems in your site

A few remarks about the event

As you know, I cover a lot of events and have so for several years. That’s why it is a great feeling when you still can get surprised. WROC# was outstanding in every aspect. For a first-time organised event with free tickets and a five figure price tag for the organisers everything went amazingly smooth and you can see the passion and drive of the organisers.

I am humbled and feel very thankful for having been part of this. The way the organisers made me feel welcome and left no question open was exceptional and many conferences can learn from the little tricks they used. The printout with a detailed day-to-day schedule for me was excellent. The “thank you” goodie bag in the room nothing more than overwhelming.

Instead of a speaker dinner the day before the event we went on a tour of the city which was also a scavenger hunt. This allowed us to not only get to know the speakers, but also the organisers and get a feeling of the place and its people before being in a venue for a day and leave as strangers again.

Attendees had exceptional catering, endless drinks, coffee and locally brewed beer for the occasion at the after party. The wireless worked and all talks were live-streamed. There was a table football tournament, arcade machines and a band and many more things to keep people around and make them get to know one another.

All in all this was an amazing conference and I spent the next day at Objectivity to give them feedback and help them with a few of their outreach/developer evangelism questions as I felt just giving my talk and being at the event all day wasn’t enough. It was a superb experience, thanks to all involved!