Conferences

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.

Peek into Goto Aarhus 2014 – Day 1

Cosmin Lazar Leave a comment

Does the browser have a future?

This was the question meant to help the attendees wake up and get into the conference mood. Tim Bray, father of XML and uncle of search engines, helped us realize where we are today when it comes to the web, from a client’s perspective. We have HTML which is an okay way of expressing the structure of your data, we have CSS to style and prettify that data (however, one can argue that CSS is broken), aaand we have the mighty DOM that we can operate with. Given the fact that most websites today use JQuery for DOM operations is a strong indicator that the DOM API is broken. These technologies might be a bit broken, but we developed several abstractions (jquery, less, coffescript) that we put on top them, so that we make the pain easier to bare.

To cut the rambling away, and just answer the question, yes, the browser does have a future, why?

  • the internet is free in the browser – there is no corporate behind it (as a counter example, you can take the world of mobile apps, where you have vendor censorship and royalties);
  • everybody runs the same version of your code – developers have one codebase, and not one for each OS.
  • even though there is an increase in mobile apps, lots of them are not native, but use a webview to display their contents

Agile

Martin Fowler and Dave Thomas, one of the 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto, are giving us a review on why the agile manifesto was created. Oversimplifying the whole thing, I believe you can summarise it as: embrace change and trust your developers by letting them do their job. They will self-optimize, they will evolve as a team, and by their nature, they will remove any friction (aka company process/policy) that stands between them and making their users happy.

But nobody is stupid enough to do this, you can’t just trust your developers, you need a serious management stack to control them. However, this does not mean that you can’t be “agile”. SAFE to the rescue!

SAFE – Shitty Agile For Enterprises

Some smart people figured out that you can sell agile, so they converted agile from being a simple set of guidelines, into a whole process, and alongside they brought in some keywords like sprint, kanban, etc just to make everything more confusing and make you feel helpless, this way you need their services to properly understand agile. This is how certifications like Agile and Scrum Master came to life. Dave Thomas, signer of the Agile Manifesto, rightfully believes that a Scrum Master certification is worth absolutely nothing. Paying around 1000 dollars and spending two days does not make you agile, and a company is not agile if all its employees are agile master certificated. However, this is the general belief these days, and lots of companies invest serious amounts of money in “agile-izing” themselves, but don’t change their internal processes and workflows to become agile.

So far, the day was a great success, the conference is well organised, the food was delicious, and there are plenty activities you can undertake between the presentations.

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!!