So I’m back from Miami, my little 3 day vacation and it was a blast!

FOWA

I was totally pumped for FOWA on feb 29th I couldn’t even sleep that night. I was up early and arrived at the venue around 7:15am-the conference didn’t start till 9. One of the main reason why I wanted to go to FOWA was to get a chance to talk with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress about a few things regarding the platform and his opinion on premium themes. But I was also interested in hearing about the future of APIs, Launch a Web App in 40 minutes, and Building the real time web.

About twenty minutes later after my arrival, I meet up with Mike Castilla from WPCandy and his friend Alain Fontaine for the first time. I meet Mike on twitter after helping him squash this nasty IE bug for one of his projects. We talked about a lot of our projects we were working on and decided to stick together since we wanted to meet the same people.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt suggested that we look all hard with our hands crossed etc. lol (photo by WPCandy)

After Matt Mullenweg gave his presentation on “The Architecture of Wordpress,” we got a chance to catch him during the AM break we had and talked well over 20 minutes. We talk about a lot of things like his opinion on premium (Paid) themes, whats going on with the whole WordPress Marketplace idea he talked about and a lot of other things going on with WordPress in general. Like others have mentioned, he’s an awesome guy, very humble and very into the community he created. (sidenote: I was going to talk about what he said in detail but that ended up being an article in itself so I’ll post that in the next article going live this weekend. I’ll be giving an update about my news theme too)

David Bracetty “the shirt guy”

(photo by WPCandy)

During the lunch break, Mike spotted out David Bracetty, who managed to get sponsors to pay for his ticket to FOWA in exchange for a spot on his shirt. I remember reading about him on bittbox and was interested in how he was able to pull off a stunt like that. So we wanted to congratulate him for being able to make it here. We ask him all sorts of questions like how he thought about the whole idea and where he was able to get the shirt printed (he got it from zazzle). After he explained how he did it, it didn’t take us long to ponder about ways we could do something similar to attend FOWD in April, but we’re still debating on that!

Elliot Jay Stocks

(photo by WPCandy)

Elliot Jay Stocks was super hard to catch. He was busy walking around filming short video snippets of people talking about their experience at FOWA. He was also helping out a lot with the event, making sure everything went smoothly. We didn’t want to bother him during his errands back n forth so we waiting until the last break when he didn’t seem too busy and we got a chance to speak with him.

We had a great conversation with Elliot talking about the whole inspiration or lack of creativity controversy and web designers just outright ripping off others since he’s been a victim of that plenty of times. Actually, Alain was the guy who informed Elliot about this designer who ripped off Elliot’s work a few times in the past so it was nice for Elliot to get to thank him in person. Elliot mentioned that he was going to be working with Adii on a premium WordPress theme in the upcoming months, which Adii previously mentioned in a power point slide. Elliot also mentioned to us a little of what he was going to talk about during his presentation at FOWD in London. I can’t wait to hear it in its entirety it sounded like something very innovative for future of web design.

Elliot handed us his moo card and we ended the conversation by him filming me saying a little about who I am and my experiences at FOWA so far which was totally unexpected. I said my part stuttering on a few occasions.

Gary Vaynerchuk

(photo by hyku)
The first time I’ve seen Gary was during the Launch a Web App in 40 minutes panel discussion. I didn’t who he was but he when he had something to say, he said it with a lot of energy and confidence which had everyone in the audience laughing. I was surprised that he was giving a presentation later on; I still didn’t know who he was or what exactly he does. When his turn came up to talk about How to Grow a Community in the Future, a lot of people started leaving as if FOWA was already over and it was time to go. I was confused but stood there to see what was going on. I guess he wasn’t too popular in the Web App community? I didn’t know but it seemed insulting that they would do that.

Anyway, he gave his speech and it was truely inspiring. Gary talked a lot about having passion and dedication for your brand or the product you’re selling. He covers how he does personal branding which is something I’ve been thinking about in the past. He really provided a lot of practical information the companies in the audience could use to build up their company or personal brand and build up a cult like community that’ll follow them throughout their ventures (think Steve Jobs). By the end of his speech, I already followed him on twitter and checked out wine library TV on my iPhone (videos didn’t show up though) to see what it was all about.

Blaine Cook

(photo by William Couch)
The FOWA conference ended with everyone heading off to the after party at the Nikki Beach in South Beach. Blaine Cook was still in the lounge, talking with a few guys so I thought maybe I could ask him a question or two about a few things that was bothering me regarding the future of Rails.

During his presentation, Blaine talked about why Twitter was having the problems they were having with Ruby on Rails and later said that if he had to start from scratch building Twitter again, he’d still go with Ruby on Rails simply because he loved Ruby.

I read a lot of controversy about ruby on rails being a ghetto, and not being able to scale. Other things like Ruby on Rails will never be like PHP since it can’t run on shared hosting environments thus not being able to adapt to main stream users. So I ask Blaine to elaborate more on why he’d still use Ruby on Rails again over something like Django or even PHP.

I specifically wanted to know if Ruby on Rails was a framework beginners (like myself) should still invest their time in learning, despite these current issues. It was great to be able to talk to someone who’s been through a lot of tough times with Rails and getting his opinion on that matter. I’m glad to get those issues cleared up since I already started investing my time into learning ruby and rails and I didn’t want to continue learning a dying framework.

Overall the weekend was great. I got a chance to meet and network with a lot of great people doing big things at FOWA; I got a chance to get all my questions answered by industry leaders (something I couldn’t do via an email or IM); I got a chance to spend some time with my family and visit a lot of places in Miami that were almost faded away in memory; three things I wouldn’t never got to fulfill if I didn’t come down here. The trip was well worth it. I can’t wait for FOWD and get a chance to visit London again.