The Travelling Programmer
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12 Nov 08
Webjam 9
Last Thursday I had the good fortune to attend Webjam 9 in Perth, Western Australia. It was great to see a whole bunch of local people getting on stage to present their ideas and products. Its rare that a bunch of presentations manages to avoid descending into tedium but the fast paced format, with each presenter having only 3 minutes, was great.
Myles Eftos, presented an amazing clone of ITunes implemented entirely in Javascript.
Someone from Buzka.com presented although, too be honest, I can't clearly remember the content of their presentation.
Lance Wiggs from Trade Me told the very short version of the story of Trade Me and their eventual acquisition by FairFax Media for $NZ 750. It was kind of weird hearing someone bandying about numbers like that in a university tavern. Still, its always great to hear a success story.
Darcy Laycock demo'd a really interesting piece of software that allows you to post to Twitter from IRC and vice versa. I dont know how much demand there is for that but I still thought it was extremely cool.
The ultimate winner of the evening's friendly competition was Matt Didcoe. Matt actually made two presentations. First he presented Whens the Next Fucking Bus? Its simply a web page where you can enter a stop number to find out how long you're going to be waiting. The uncaught exception it threw during the demo added a nice touch of realism. Second, he presented soundfolder.com This looks cool but I'm not entirely sure what it does...
All in all it was a highly enjoyable evening. I laughed more than I have in a long time, met some interesting people and saw some interesting presentations. I'll definitely be looking to go to more events like it in future.