Inside Picnik: How We Built Picnik (and What We Learned Along the Way)

Building an RIA from scratch can be a daunting task, especially for a team with little web experience. Over the last year Picnik has grown has grown 1400%. Decisions that we had made the year before helped up to scale without much difficulty. We’ll provide an overview of how we came to choose some of the technologies that we use in our Client and Server (Flash/Flex, Perlbal, Mogile, Xen, AWS) and how they’ve grown with us (or not!) over the last couple of years. We’ll be candid about why we made the choices we made and what we’d do differently.

Most sites consume 3rd party APIs like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace, and more and more sites build increasingly intricate dependencies on outside services such as Amazon Web Services. Well offer up something thoughts that you should consider when working with these kind of services.

Fortunately, there is a ton of good information and technologies available on the web to get you from bare metal to web 2.0 in little time. How do you pick from all of the good choices out there? Join us for an hour that can save you weeks of frustration. We’ll cover many of the technologies that we use and talk about their pros and cons.