Day 1 of WeAreDevelopers: from the Woz to the future of the web
Day 1 had a strong start with Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder. His talk was live on the main stage, as well as streamed in all the other conference rooms on all floors. By the way, the main stage was just wow: three rooms connected together, creating enough space to host the European Council and looking like an appropriate meeting place for the intergalactic starfleet congress.
Wozniak had kind of a just-what-we-all-hoped-for talk, that included many funny moments, as well as actual advice on innovation and creating things from scratch:
- real innovation is not higher resolution, but creating something new
- if there’s no book for something, you have to write a new book
- about giving up on FB he said something like “I have 5000 friends that I don’t know; I want to live my life rather than showing it off”
- creative people don’t like to get tagged by algorithms, don’t want to be placed in groups and receive appropriate content as to what that group is
- on blockchain: trust is really great, but probably the whole things needs another 10 years to evolve
- AI is artificial; it’s not intelligent
Joseph Sirosh, VP of AI at Microsoft, had a very well prepared presentation, including showcases of real apps that use AI to help people communicate (Down syndrome support for example) as well as to automate much factory work like for example visual quality control. The highlight of the show was the JFK Files project, which is also open on Github here. When the right slide came up, the music of X Files shook the whole room, capturing everyone’s attention. This project uses many of Azure’s cognitive services in order to scan all the recently-released documents, analyse and connect data. The UI allows for instant search through the documents and for finding relationships between entities. Takeaways:
- AI is the new normal
- such powerful capabilities are made available almost like a simple function call now
- by using AI you can make unstructured data make sense
The funnies presentation of all for me was Ellen Shapiro’s Stupid Enum Tricks. It started with a clear message: we pronounce the word like “ee-numb” — and who doesn’t agree to this may just as well leave the room (big laughs). It explored interesting ways of using enum’s in iOS and Kotlin and the slides had mostly code.
Renaud Visage, Eventbrite co-founder, gave insights on how the 2006 founded company evolved over time from the very basic API’s to the advanced integrations of today. He used FB to examplify, where you don’t event have to relogin or change platforms in order to finish the transaction, due to using shared tokens between the platforms. And for lessons learned he said one should treat his/her own API as if it were an external one.
Ilya Grigorik (Google) had an excellent speech on the future of the web. He started from the past to show that the web is constantly evolving and never stopping in doing that: for example after the web was declared dead in 2010 (see here), the answer came later in the form of responsive design. And then he mentioned Mobilgeddon, when Google decided in 2015 to rank mobile applications higher than desktop ones, causing panic but in the end leading to better user experiences. The new trend seems to be Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s), which try to use desktop-like features such as caching, etc., and he recommended that we test the Twitter one. The talk also mentioned the Chrome User Experience Report, Page Speed Insights and the Https vs Http battle: apparently in the (not known) future Chrome will mark all Http website as Not Secure in the top bar. Hasthag in the end: #teamweb
You’ll find my article on the whole event here.
