Welcome to Arkanis Development

Yesterday I held a talk at the HdM WebDay 2010 about the creative use of web technologies. There were some really interesting questions and good feedback. I think I succeeded in the goal of motivating people to take a closer look at those technologies. :)

The presentation of the talk is available here: Keep it simple, know your tools. It contains not only the presentation as seen on the WebDay but also quite some additional text to explain some concepts in case you didn't see the talk. The recording shown here an also be downloaded directly: talk recording in OGV format. Sorry Apple users but I didn't want to encode the video twice. Take a look at the events.mi archive for an MP4 version (also in better quality).

However the presentation only gives a very brief overview of those technologies. Many of them have their drawbacks and little quirks. The presentation alone is not a perfect starting point for learning about them because I only showed what's possible but not how to do it.

If you're interested in details I can write more about specific topics e.g. on how to build such a presentation, working with URL rewriting rules or what possibilities files offer to store stuff on the server. Writing about all of them is too much work without motivating feedback but don't hesitate to aks for details. Knowing some people are interested in it is enough motivation to write an article. ;)

The WebDay as a whole was very interesting and I was impressed how many people where there despite the fact that it was Friday afternoon. Recordings of all talks can be found in the events.mi archive.

One of the most interesting aspects is the wide range of development methods that were presented at the WebDay. From my "keep it simple and creatively use your tools" talk up to domain driven development with Typo3 which operates on a whole different level of thoughts. I think I never witnessed an event where it was that obvious how many different ways of developing software for the internet exist.

Another very funny part of the WebDay were the yellow balls flying around in the room. These are actually microphones that record the questions and the feedback of the audience for the live stream and the recordings. It worked very well for the first real test drive and I'm sure the "Maier-Kriha balls" will be very useful in the future. (Thomas Maier build them and professor Kriha had the idea).

All in all a very nice Friday afternoon. :)