The Questions
Why has the lightbox on the web-site stopped working?
Why have the Y generation (or maybe a bit newer) not moved from IM to twitter? Twitter is still in the alpha geek stage, and we alpha geeks tend to live in a bit of a coocoon. Not everyone in the world spends 24/7 online learning about new tech (and tweeting).
When Twitter goes mainstream, do we all leave? Yes. Remember ICQ? Take-up, by geeks, tail, etc. (From the audience: “My Mum has a lower ICQ number than me.”)
CSS drop-down, works in Firefox, but not IE. Why? :hover on non-a.
GPL making software sales redundant? The people who use OSS are alpha geeks. Being able to buy it, buy support, etc. It’s not a silver bullet or a panacea by any stretch of the imagination.
Do you think that distributed version control is going to kill centralised? No. Decentralisation bad (in most people’s circumstances).
Is IE going to keep it’s huge market share? Probably. Inertia, status quo, don’t care, etc.
Do you have a favourite Australian tech podcast? I don’t listen to podcasts. I want to get the information and leave.
Am I lazy using prototype for my AJAX? No. Absolutely not. So long as you understand what it’s doing, using frameworks is great.
I just got here and I’ve got no idea what Edge of the Web is The AWIA web conference announced today?
What do you think about developing from a platform, rather than from first principals? They’re different. Different audiences (S3 is a remote platform, App Engine is a cloud, OpenSocial has a specific purpose).
Lets say a client comes to you and asks you to build something; how do you estimate how long/much it’ll take? This is a problem that’s been haunting the software community basically forever. It basically boils down to experience. Breaking it down into components helps estimate effectively and gives slack, etc.