Talking about the web of data and YQL in Frankfurt

Last week I went to Frankfurt, Germany, to speak to the budding developer scene there at a DevDusk brunch and at the Webmontag.

The brunch was an informal meeting where originally we planned to start a German translation of myDeveloper Evangelism Handbook, but got distracted by food and drink, and instead only chatted about web development in general. One thing I managed to do was introduce the Germans to the fun of Spotify, GitHub and Bespin.

Webmontag was more defined but still a nice and short developer evening. Normally Webmontag presentations are limited to 15 minutes, but since I’d flown over from California for the event, my slot was extended to half an hour.

My presentation dealt with the change in web design that instead of building for the web we should start building with the web. By distributing our content across the web and bringing it back to one location, we automatically start bringing our brand and ideas to the web without having to spend a lot of money on SEO and link-building.

YQL (Yahoo! Query Language) is one of the main tools that can help you with this. An example I showed was a page about Frankfurt that is fully driven by content on the web and thus is easy to update.

My slides are available on SlideShare:

The notes and transcript (including code examples) are available on my blog.

If you speak German there is even more available, namely the slides, an audio recording, and the notes and transcript.

Other topics presented at Webmontag included: Axel Dunkel on scaling your server to avoid downtime, Andre Morys on optimizing conversion rates, Wolfram Kriesing on mobile development with W3C widgets, and Jan Philip Johl introducing a new idea for a brand called “made in happy Germany.”

All in all I had a great time. It was good to see that smaller meetups don’t have to be startup showcases but can be a good mix of usability and hard-core tech talks. If you are interested in Webmontag and you are in Germany contact Darren Cooper.

Chris Heilmann (@codepo8)
Yahoo Developer network

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