Add an eventWeek notes 3: How we built Lanyrd
Now that we're back in London, Nat and I have been getting stuck in to the local events scene. This week we gave two talks about Lanyrd, discussing our progress so far and explaining some of the underlying technology we've used to build the site.
Insites Tour and the London Web meetup
On Monday we were interviewed by Keir Whitaker as part of the London leg of the Insites Tour. Insites is an interesting event format: no slides, no prepared talk, just three interviews with web professionals talking about their careers, experiences and what they learned along the way. We talked about Lanyrd's origins on honeymoon in Casablanca (you can read more in this Xconomy profile of Lanyrd from May) and the experience of going through Y Combinator and turning our side project in to a full-blown company.
On Thursday, I gave a more more technical presentation to the London Web meetup group on How we bootstrapped Lanyrd using Twitter's social graph. I talked about the pros and cons of developing against Twitter's social graph, and described some of the components we use under the hood. The slides are up already, and audio and video of the talk should be available soon.
If you're interested in seeing us speak, Nat will be talking at sameAs: serendipity on the 8th of August, and I'll be presenting at BrightonPy next month as well.
Skillswap Brighton
On Wednesday I headed up to Brighton for Skillswap cuddles up to HTML5. Skillswap is a long-running series of evening talks, currently curated by James Box. This time round the topic was HTML5, with Glenn Jones and Remy Sharp battling it out to give the most impressive demo.
Glenn talked about interactions between web applications and the desktop, in particular drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste. Drag and drop on the web is usually an illusion created with JavaScript, but the HTML5 specification defines native drag and drop which can integrate with the desktop (inspired by APIs that have been in Internet Explorer for years).
Glenn demonstrated dragging and dropping microformatted content between different web applications running in different windows, and between a web page and the desktop in both directions. He followed up with some very clever demos of copy-and-paste used for the same thing - something that isn't yet covered by the specifications but can be achieved using a series of ingenious hacks.
Remy focused on HTML5's offline APIs, demonstrating an application which uses event data from Lanyrd to enable offline storage of notes. HTML5 offline support is in a much healthier state than drag-and-drop, but still suffers from some fragmentation when it comes to WebSQL v.s. IndexedDB.
Both talks reinforced my opinion that there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in front-end web development. I'm looking forward to Remy's Full Frontal conference in Brighton later this year.
Small improvements
We're working on some larger features at the moment, but we found time to roll out some smaller fixes this week. We've added past and future tabs to our place, topic and topic-in-place pages making it easier to browse through our archive of older events.
We've also made some improvements to our iCal feeds - if you subscribe to our iCal feeds for topics, places, topic-in-places or your own calendar we now include both the event tagline and a link to our event page.
Another small improvement, this time to our office quality of life: we took delivery of (and assembled) two sofas for the Lanyrd meeting room!
Coming next week, weather permitting: the long awaited Lanyrd team trip to see the otters at London Zoo.
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