Yesterday evening saw the second Cape Town Facebook Developer Garage take place. The event was a complete success and I think I learnt more about Facebook than I thought was possible.
I was given the wonderful opportunity of being MC for the evening, so as much as that stressed me out, it also gave me a chance to learn something new and exercise public speaking a little. After welcoming everyone to the evening, we kicked things off with a talk on the Importance & usability of Facebook Applications by Christine from AlterSage – it was a lovely general over view of Facebook applications and the perfect mood to set the scene. After Christine, Tim from Wired Communications told us all about his experience in the process of managing a Facebook application client. Tim gave us a great overview of his background and how he got involved with managing a campaign which involved around a Facebook application. If you are interested in taking a look at the application, created by FormFunction, for Tim, click here. Bare in mind, you can actually win prizes using this application! Tim wonderful speech was followed by a very interesting list of tips for developers by Joey from FormFunction. The list of tips revolved around the topic of Managing Client Expectations – It was clear that Joey took a lot of time thinking about this, every tip was dead accurate!
After the first few speakers were complete, I motioned everyone outside for some pizza sponsored by Butlers and some cool drinks sponsored by Joyent. The break lasted 45mins, which gave everyone a good chance to have something to eat and drink, as well as do their required networking. After the break, we all headed back into the theatre for the second half of the evening.
We kicked off the second half with a very technical talk on Memcache by Jacques. I must admit that a lot of the information went straight over my head, but it was very clear that caching is extremely important and that Jacque clearly is a boffin ;) Steven and Grant from TextStream then presented us with 7 tips on monetizing Facebook applications – their talk was extremely informative and raised a large number of questions which took place in the QnA section afterwards.
Many of the questions asked by the audience raised massive topics and eventually the time ran on far too late and we had to close off the evening with a big thanks to everyone for attending as well as a thank you to all the lovely sponsors.
A number of people remained afterwards to chat about application development and in the end, I only managed to leave just before 12! A fantastic evening all-in-all and I look forward to the next one.
