Web Expo 2012, Prague

At long last I made it to Prague – this is my first time in this beautiful city. Since studying Má Vlast at school, I always wanted to see Prague and the glorious arrival of the Moldau (Vltava) with of course Smetana playing in the background or was it just in my iPod. The town and its surroundings are wonderful. I was a little disappointed in finding Tesco, M&S and of course Burger King, Mac Donalds, KFT etc. but I suppose there is always a price to pay for the good things in life.

Prague’s very famous Web Expo was held at the University of Economics, Winston Churchill Square. Web expo was created by Vaclav Stoupa, 5 years ago. Vaclav’s aim was to put together the developers, the web designers and the commercials to ensure that they talk together instead of keeping apart until the end of the project when it becomes time consuming and expensive to change. This kind of reminds me of DevOps but apparently I got it wrong. 5 years ago, 400 people attended the conference, now it is sold out with 1300 attendees – a huge success whowing the needs of the participants.

Some O’Reilly authors were speaking at the event:

• 10 Steps to Product/Market Fit  by Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean –

• Coefficients of Friction  by Alistair Croll, author of forthcoming Lean Analytics

• PHPUnit Best Practices  by Sebastian Bergmann, author of Integrating PHP Projects with Jenkins  and PHPUnit Pocket Guide

The exhibition hall was very different with a massage den, special teas stand, fresh fruit squeezed in front of you etc. The food was plenty and so good!

The Czech Republic is a very small country with a limited number of speakers in the fields covered by Web Expo. Vaclav is well aware that future programmes will become very repetitive if he does not look outside the country. Looking at the future, he intends to invite foreign speakers to add to the quality of the talks and make the programme more varied. Outside speakers will bring a different kind of flavour to the conference including talks in English. Of course there is the risk of losing some of the delegates if the programme is all in English but at the same time it should attract more foreign delegates. Watch out for Web Expo 2013!