Pownce Lessons Learned - FOWA 2007

Slides are here.

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This entry was written by Leah, posted on October 8, 2007 at 9:59 am.

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28 Comments

  1. Bastien

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 11:20 am | Permalink

    Great slideshow :)

  2. James

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 11:32 am | Permalink

    Thanks for posting this, nice presentation last week!

  3. Avatar

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 12:59 pm | Permalink

    Really good presentation and given pownce i dependant of only one person as the lead developer, i can understand why you choose Django over something more powerful but more complex like .NET or ROR

    Still very cool, i have faith in it.

  4. Antonio

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

    Very nice presentation. Wish I could’ve made it out there to see this. Also, it’s pretty impressive that you have developed the Pownce web application all on your own. Congrats on the success so far.

  5. Mike Robinson

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 2:37 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for putting up the slides, I wasn’t able to go to the conference and this was one of the presentations I was looking forward to :)

  6. Angel

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 3:32 pm | Permalink

    Great slideshow - thanks for sharing.

  7. Jaso Cartwright

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 4:20 pm | Permalink

    “Don’t prematurely optimize” - unless you work with Kevin Rose… lmao

  8. mike

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 4:28 pm | Permalink

    is the presentation available anywhere online?

  9. Mike Caudill

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 4:51 pm | Permalink

    I just retired. Can’t say I miss all those presentations. At least yours was short, sweet, and focused.

  10. Brendan

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 6:13 pm | Permalink

    Great slide show Leah. Any video available of this?

    Some great tips there! Thanks for sharing, and for caring about user interface and your users :)

  11. Blake Shannon

    Posted October 8, 2007 at 9:07 pm | Permalink

    Great Slide Show, this was one of the presentations I was looking forward too. Do you know if Kevin and Daniel are putting there presentations up?

  12. Johan Carlsson

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 12:04 am | Permalink

    Thanks!
    I think this is really great advice, thanks for making your experience public.

  13. Marie Casas

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 3:00 am | Permalink

    Hi Leah! Thanks for putting this up!
    We’re gearing up a new web app and I take care of everything but the programming (lol). Glad to get new insights and help me understand my partners better… what I know from my undergrad SAD subjects for accounting is pretty old school :)

  14. James

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 7:29 am | Permalink

    Ryan Carson did mention there should be some stuff going up on the FOWA website when ready but I don’t know A) What format it will be, most likely MP3 or B) What presentations it will be available for. You should be able to buy a DVD for all presentations from the website as well.

    Worth keeping an eye on: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/ just in case!

  15. Chris Fane

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 7:55 am | Permalink

    i was glad i caught ur presentation, it was really good to see that a site like pownce can be built by a small team, on a limited budget.

    Had you used Django previously ? how long did it take u to be productive ? ive spent the summer workng with python, so it seems like a natural progression, and might be enough to drag me away from PHP. But from what ive seen Django looks like it good be really promising.

  16. Levi Figueira

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 10:15 am | Permalink

    Great keynote! :)
    I’m in the process of trying to decide on what framework/language to choose to learn myself, so that I can develop some ideas and projects I have, and I had Django/Python up there in the list! You just gave it the final tip! :)
    Another note I liked seeing was referring to IRC in resources! To be honest, most of the tech stuff I’ve learned (more in the sysadmin area in my case, but some coding aswell) was through IRC… It’s the best way to interact with guys that use the same tools and, in lot’s of cases, are actually developers of the tools themselves!

    Keep it up! :)

  17. Juan Pablo Pincheira

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 10:47 am | Permalink

    Nice to know your experience on this application. I think the most important step is, as you wrote, to be prepared to scale up your app. A big one.

    Greets!

  18. alexis

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 11:39 am | Permalink

    Cool that you are using messaging and queues. Is it bad form of me to point you at our product RabbitMQ? It has a full broker implementation of AMQP plus a very simple Python client (since you guys use Python I thought I’d say so). The license is open source: MPL 1.1. It may be useful if you want to do more with messaging, or send more messages around :-)

  19. Todd Sieling

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 11:54 am | Permalink

    Great slides, Leah. Thanks for sharing them and your expereince.

  20. Ted

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 7:22 pm | Permalink

    Have to laugh that the DB was the bottleneck. How have you abstracted your queries or are you passing sql straight into the DB? Anyway, great presentation and always nice to see what is going there. Also impressed that you’ve done the dev as a team of one. But alas, for so many developers, performance is an afterthought especially when the db can be blamed.

    –T

  21. leigh mackay

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 7:44 pm | Permalink

    very good, I like the faces they made me laugh.

  22. Luca Bastos

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 8:20 pm | Permalink

    Thanks, very cool, but after this I would like to try Pownce

  23. Victor Barriga

    Posted October 9, 2007 at 9:01 pm | Permalink

    great presentation, is there any video from the conference?

  24. Mike

    Posted October 10, 2007 at 4:49 am | Permalink

    “is the presentation available anywhere online?”

    Wait…is this blog like an offline parallel universe, or did I miss something? I believe you can buy a CD/DVD of the event slides and other material for 250 GBP, which at current exchange rates is about $1.5 billion.

    Leah, could you please remind Kevin about the Pownce invite I asked him for at the end of his talk?

    Thanks for the slides!

  25. Cameron

    Posted October 10, 2007 at 3:45 pm | Permalink

    mike - I can email you a pownce invite. email me cambo@thecambo.com

  26. BizBob

    Posted October 11, 2007 at 12:57 am | Permalink

    Great tips. We’ll definitely sit down and compare how we do things to your experience. We use Trac to keept track of things. Works great. How about you?

  27. Fabio

    Posted October 11, 2007 at 11:00 am | Permalink

    Excellent presentation, thanks for sharing that…

  28. Menelkir

    Posted October 12, 2007 at 10:01 pm | Permalink

    Perfect presentation. Thanks for sharing.

3 Trackbacks

  1. By FOWA: Leah Culver from Pownce  »TechAddress on October 8, 2007 at 11:35 pm

    […] Leah Culver from Pownce has posted her slides from the Future of Web Apps in London. I have embedded them below. I hope the Carson Systems gang posts her video as the slides alone lose the more important off-slide discussion. The discussion was titled, "Practical Lessons We Learned - Pownce". […]

  2. By Dubroy.com/blog » Two outta three ain’t bad on October 9, 2007 at 5:49 am

    […] Culver, the lead developer of Pownce, posted the slide deck from her talk at FOWA 2007: Pownce - Lessons learned. I learned a few interesting things about […]

  3. By taylordavis.com » Blog Archive » links for 2007-10-19 on October 18, 2007 at 8:39 pm

    […] Leah Culver’s Stupid Blog » Blog Archive » Pownce Lessons Learned - FOWA 2007 Leah’s presentation about lessons learned from building Pownce. (tags: programming web2.0) […]