conference

Peek into Goto Aarhus 2014 – Day 2

Cosmin Lazar Leave a comment

The first day of Goto Aarhus 2014 ended up with a James Bond themed dinner and party. The James Bond theme had little to no advertisement, therefore, not a lot of people dressed up to meet the theme, and the only few that did looked a bit out of place. Leaving the theme aside, the food was good and the party was a success.

The second day began with Russ Olsen giving a very inspiring presentation labeled “To the moon” (link from another conference here). The presentation was a success, as he managed to get us all to forget about our daily programming issues and just be proud of us, as we are kinda driving a lot of things happening in the world right now (planes, factories, etc).

Moving forward in the day, I got to watch Matias Niemelä give a presentation labeled “Enhanced Front-end Applications in AngularJS 1.3”. I was having high hopes of this presentation, especially because Matias is a core developer of AngularJS. However, the disappointment quickly installed as he progressed through his slides. This was because he divided his presentation in two, the first half was used to introduce us to AngularJS and the second part to show us some of the new features of AngularJS. His plan sounds good on paper, as the first half will introduce the technology, and the second would take you to the edge of it. However the implementation was a bit “uncool”, this is because the time that he had was of course limited, and his presentation was extremely code heavy. Therefore he was just running through the slides, throwing code left and right, all this while us, the audience, could not keep up with him, and we ended up only appreciating his fast keyboard handling abilities. The audience actually tried to get him to slow down, however, he could not be decelerated.

Further on, the day progressed with Chris Atherton briefly introducing us to how the human brain works, specifically orientated on the visual/eyesight part. As expected, the presentation focused on how should information be structured when presented to the user, so that calls to action can be easily observed.

The conference is slowly progressing to the end and I am now attending the closing keynote. After the keynote, off I will be to a 2 hours introduction to Xamarin by James Montemagno.

My way through GOTO Aarhus 2014 – Day 2

Cosmin Lazar Leave a comment

Deciding the path that I will take through the first day of GOTO Aarhus 2014 was difficult, but it now proves to have been nothing in comparison with deciding the second day. For every time slot in the schedule I have at least two different presentations that I would like to attend, however, since I am not living in the world of quantum mechanics and I cannot be in two places at the same time I need to slice and dice, and most important, decide. Here we go:

New Linting Rules, by Kyle Simpson

This promises to be a hardcore and code-heavy exploration of JavaScript. Kyle even issued a warning to the attendees, recommending they have strong knowledge and understanding of the language. Myself, I don’t qualify to be regarded as a suitable attendee for his presentation, as my knowledge and understanding of JS is at a basic level, but I enjoy being challenged and explore the hard parts, because if you understand the hard parts, you will also understand the easy parts.

Enhanced Front-end Applications in AngularJS 1.3, by Matias Niemelä

Even though I mastered the CodeSchool AngularJS course, I am far away from being proficient with this exquisite technology. Getting an introduction to the new features, and general guidance from one of the core developers of AngularJS is more than welcomed :)

UX for mobile: it’s all about attention, by Chris Atherton

Undoubtable, the research in user experience, user behavior and attention span, is now being used to persuade us to buy more, and click more ads. You cannot consider yourself a true software ninja without having some knowledge in this field.

Where’s Captain Kirk? Charting a Course Through Enterprise Architecture, by Eva Andreasson, Kevlin Henney, Ola Bini, and Randy Shoup

Enterprise architecture, such a fancy congregation of words, used mostly to describe the modern version of spaghetti code, except that now we don’t jump from one section of code to another, but instead from one application to another. Everybody has to understand and agree that enterprise architecture is important, and care must be taken when defining it.

Apart from the conference, GOTO Aarhus also features two days of training on Wednesday (1st of October),  and Thursday (2nd of October).

That was it for now, remember to stay tuned, as there will be more posts, live from the conference!!

My way through RavenDB Conference, Malmö 2014

Cosmin Lazar Leave a comment

Last week (18th of September 2014) I attended the RavenDB conference in Malmö, Sweden. As expected, the conference focused primarily on the upcoming release of the 3rd version of RavenDB, but it also included a use case talk (a successful story of implementing RavenDB in a high availability solution) given by Manuel Scapolan and Mauro Servienti.

In a cozy atmosphere, and surrounded by approximately 30 attendants, Oren Eini (aka Ayende, aka the god of RavenDB) briefly introduced us to the main upcoming features of RavenDB 3.0:

The conference also included talks by Michael Yarichuk (RavenDB contributor),  and Judah Himango (RavenDB’s HTML5 Studio Creator).

Having so many new features and enhancements, means that the RavenDB source code has changed, therefore obsoleting the parts that I studied. Therefore, I should probably get back to understanding these new features from the inside out by reviewing their mighty source code.