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Ryan Carson and the Carsonified team jetted in to Dublin to show the software enthusiasts and developers of Ireland something they had been missing for a long time. A world class event that spanned the breath of the web development sector - designers, coders and pretty much every true-hearted techie alike - that produced a turnout which made those present realise just how much diversity and interesting development is going on in Ireland. There was no shortage of passion from the speakers or excitement from the audience. In short, the Future Of Web Apps brought a little bit of Silicon Valley to Dublin.

The event itself covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from software development and security to business tips for new entrepreneurs. One of the highlights was Robin Christopherson's talk on accessibility, who really showed how a blind person experiences the web - both the richness of the experience when things are designed correctly and the pain of simply navigating it when it's done wrong. Dave Concannon does a fantastic job of covering the conference and talks in great detail on his blog.

Particularly encouraging was the sight of the so many Irish startups on display, kicked off in style by Contrast, a Dublin based company, who've built a kickass reputation by developing on the hot and exciting Ruby on Rails platform. Also on stage were IGOpeople, with their social network solution to driving business-customer feedback, and Anton Mannering with UDooGoo, a social network cloud and identity service. Last but certainly not least, ByteSurgery rounded off the array of Irish startups with Decisions For Heroes, a software solution which gave a refreshing real world angle to proceedings - discussing how rescue centres could use this software to improve the performance of their teams when responding to an incident. Take that Twitter!

But what really set this event apart is simply that everyone turned up. Perhaps it was the calibre of speakers that brought every hacker out from under whatever stone they might have been hiding under for the last while. One such figure is David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of 37 Signals and creator of Rails, who gave the closing presentation with an impassioned rallying call to the embryonic Irish businesses in the audience on how to make a success of their idea. In fact, everywhere you turned there was a lot of passion on display. Whatever it was, it seemed to work. The tone of the event was set from the start, when the uber-chilled event coordinator, Ryan Carson, took a moment to ask everyone to say a "Hey, what's up!" to whoever was sitting beside them. This vibe helped ensure that by six o clock plenty had swapped their keyboards for cocktails and were still around by the time the party finished at the Dandelion in the early hours of Saturday morning. The words of the day were 'kickass' and 'awesome' and that pretty much sums up the event. Let's hope for more awesome kickass events between now and FOWA Dublin's promised return in 2010. And with OSSBarcamp on the horizon, we might not have to long...

• Ireland
• FOWA
• Dublin
• Software
• Conference
• 2009