Safe and Sound
April 2010
Continuing the theme of keeping myself busy with geek events! I also recently attended the Microsoft UK Tech Days Visual Studio and .NET 4 talks.
To be fair a lot of the content was similar to what I had already heard at ddd8. So we're talking Optional Parameters, Named Arguments, Generic Variance and Dynamic Typing for .NET 4 plus multi-monitor support, changes to code highlighting and javascript intellisense and a WPF interface for Visual Studio... I particularly liked the 'code only' profile for VS that disables some unnecessary services and hides all windows/toolbars except for the editor and solution explorer.
In addition to this the parallelisation features of .net were discussed (AsParallel(), PLINQ) - something that's always intriguing and worth trying out. And there were niceities too for asp.net. Caching being pushed into a provider model, controllable client IDs and a far more slimline web.config are all a part of this.
Overall
Barcamp Bournemouth 2
April 2010
Having been to a few of the 'big' conferences and just returned from SXSW it was quite refreshing to attend a more small scale, local affair. With other barcamp's often being either far away or both far away and starting too soon after work BarCamp Bournemouth made it easy, running over a weekend and being so close!
I must of course say congratulations to the organisers for putting in the effort to provide a free social/conference for up to 100 attendees. No small feat, including organising the venue plus sponsorship for two free meals.
In terms of comparison I would suggest that the small scale nature of the event made it much more of a 'geek social' than a free conference. Which made it a heck of a lot more fun but perhaps less about learning.
I made it to a number of talks including a run through of scala (with some very similar features to .net), a designers do better rant from Rich Quick, partook in a .NET MVC discussion, a number of discussions surrounding the Digital Economy Bill, and an intro to British Sign Language (from Lalita D'Cruze). And yes, I can now sign my name :-)
Off the back of this I looked into what other smallscale events are run in my area:
So will show up to those in due course. I also learnt to play Polarity and Werewolf!
SXSW - In Reflection
March 2010
Having seen (or at least made notes on) 17 talks at last year's 'South By', coupled with the fact that this year pretty much the entire Headscape team were heading out to Austin I felt sure that my 'talk total' would be much lower. However I somehow managed to make it out to 21 different talks, panels and/or podcast recordings!
Unfortunately I didn't find the time to write up these notes during the conference. But I will do so over the coming days (and backdate them within this blog).
For me, this year had quite a different feel to it. Knowing 11 rather than just 3 people from the outset leant itself to more of a family holiday feel than a networking event...
The Talks
In terms of the talks there seemed to be a theme of design and persuasion with less technical technique oriented items on the schedule. However as I've said before technique 'takeaways' are few and far between at large scale conferences. In fact it is perhaps more beneficial to dip into some sessions that won't necessarily have a direct impact on your role. Instead they will enrich it with insight into some other aspect of web design/development work. This is useful particularly within small agencies where roles are often blurred. For me this included talks on psychology, design and interfaces.
Looking back at last year I spent a lot of time checking out Flash and iPhone based talks which this year seem to have been replaced by Javascript/HTML5, or geo/location based talks. To me this matches the movemement in the industry away from flash (due to devices like the iPhone driving it out) and away from 'device features' to 'applications that can be based on device features' e.g. "OK, your device has access to GPS, what can I now actually make with that".
IE
It's interesting to note that last year I was listening to Microsoft Rep's discussing IE8's intended CSS capabilities and during this years SXSW IE9 was being announced/discussed at Microsoft MIX. With talk of SVG, CSS3 and GPU powered graphics. They really seem to be ramping up their versions now in competition with Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera (after their 5 year IE6/7 gap), with some promising stuff coming out of redmond.
Overall SXSW was definitely worth reattending. I've returned once again enthused about the industry and getting stuck into some interesting projects, although it would be interesting to take some time to attend more workshop based events in the UK in the future.
Boagworld 200th
February 2010
It was my pleasure to take part in the 200th Boagworld (bw200) yesterday. A marathon session that started with Bob, Paul and I waiting outside the locked barn keyless and cold until Dave, Stanton and Ryan came to the rescue...
In my mind the day was like a free one day, online conference with a brilliant lineup all sharing their time for free. There wasn't too rigid a schedule with guests in and out all the time either via skype or in person. However there was a general plan of 30minute sessions (expertly co-ordinated and organised by Ryan Taylor).
Each session was recorded and as far as I'm aware will be released by Marcus and Paul over the coming weeks.
Highlights for me included a relaxed, and seemingly extremely well read (if his bookshelf was anything to go by) Andy Clarke getting into a heated debate with Paul regarding browser support / progressive enhancement and some excellent food for thought from Drew Mclellan and Rachel Andrew in regard to e-commerce projects.
The only real lowlight was some rather unnecessary behaviour in the backchannel. Other than that it's a shame each guest was only on for 30minutues as there was some excellent content that could have taken up entire shows in their own right.
Thanks to the rotating host system I got to co-host a chat with Drew and Rachel on The Joel Test and to speak with Christian Heilmann about Yahoo's YQL.
The Joel test is an interesting one that allows teams to take a step back and guage how effectively they are operating. Covering questions on Source Control, bug tracking, scheduling and working conditions.
One of the tests that we didn't have time for was 'Do new candidates write code during their interview?' which for me is something that I've been wrestling with at Headscape (where we do ask for code to be created as part of the application process). Shortly I will be posting an article covering my thoughts on the matter (as encouraged by Emily).
Unfortunately I think there was a misunderstanding regarding the length of Christians session (being only half an hour instead of an hour) however I think it was one of the best sessions for takeaway action. The YQL demos that Christian had prepared showed us just how easily web apps and mashups can be created by standing on the shoulders of Yahoo. Allowing us to get down to the real functionally of our apps rather than worrying about the wiring of individual pieces across differing API boundaries. I urge you to take a look at the YQL Demos that Christian prepared.
All in all, a great day. Thanks to everyone involved (especially Cath for providing food for us all!
Some related bits and bobs
- A Flickr set of the show
- Some more photos from Stanton
- GooHooBi - An example of YQL usage to aggregate multiple search engines
- Christians YQL demo writeup
P.S. I'm still not sure Paul noticed the hijack of his about page throughout the day... did you?
Developer Day 8
February 2010
Another Developer Day over, another enthusiasm shot for the day job. Here's the usual breakdown:
| DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper: Speaker / Thoughts | |
|---|---|
| Mark Needham (ThoughtWorks) |
Not really what I had expected based on the title alone... After introducing functional programming as a language with first class functions (can be created during execution, passed/returned etc), immutability, lazy evaluation, recursion and pattern matching Mark proceeded to demo 'Transformational' instead of imperative thinking using the linq implementations of a variety of 'functional' principles: Map = Select, Filter = Where, Reduce ≅ Sum. Usage of such extensions on IEnuemerable allow code to be more declarative - with the statement of the desired result being specified as opposed to the exact process to undertake. Although Mark did make some good points in reference to realising linq can easily lead to duplication (reminding me of jquery selectors being used multiple times because they look small, irrespective of the actual work they are doing), the content generally had a low difficulty level feeling (which could have been enhanced perhaps by focusing more on the design patterns content that was briefly touched on), with a chunk of the questions at the end critiquing the examples rather than drilling down into the subject. |
| Mixing functional and object oriented approaches to programming in C# | |
| Andrea Magnorsky (Round Crisis) |
Probably my favourite talk of the day Andrea gave an excellent fast paced intro to Unit Testing using Xunit and Moq. With the example of testing an OrderService we saw how to use consistent, verbose naming of tests for clarity/ease of use and were reminded that a unit really does mean a small unit. For example multiple tests of the save method of OrderService were used to illustrate a first simple 'does not throw' test, through using a stub of an invalid object to check the 'if not valid return false' nature of save to using a mock of an email sender to check that a 'send email' call is sent. By using mocks and stubs the testing of the order service is contained only to the logic within the service and not to any of it's dependencies - any repository related aspects should be tested separately. The phase 'be super paranoid about your tests' enforced the idea that test code is no smaller matter than production code, and if anything should be treated even more thoroughly. A general rule given was that behaviour tests end in a Verify on Mock whereas state tests end in an Assert and that tests follow an Arrange, Action, Assert (or verify) flow. The final golden rules were: tests should not involve conditionals, should not depend on other tests and should not assess multiple expectations. Although pointed to during the talk it would be interesting to hear more about unit testing in the context of Test Driven Development. |
| Lessons learned on Unit Testing | |
| Jon Skeet (Google) |
Having previously seen Jon Skeet recreate linq to objects in 60mins this was undoubtedly going to be a good session. Jon covered the main 'newness' coming in C#4.0
|
| C# 4 | |
| Lunch Time | The Grok talks this year seemed a far bigger deal (with a large room and a lot of attendees). Some good tidbits included a demo of using T4 templates to generate code/sql/xaml in visual studio from Rob Blackmore and a run through of CodeRush Xpress by Rory Becker. |
| Grok Talks | |
| Simon Sabin (SQL Server Consultant) |
As with most developers I have been concerned by the use of ORM's such as Linq2Sql and EF in terms of the 'auto generated' sql that they produce. Simon allayed some of those concerns by running a number of test queries, using instrumentation such as 'SET STATISTICS TIME ON' to compare the differing sql between manually and EF created, with mostly good results. There were a few specific examples of weakness in EF1 however the speed of application construction must be balanced against the speed of direct ADO.NET queries (which vastly outperformed the ORM queries - with no overhead for mapping etc). A couple of important things to remember are that when you construct a sql statement you are asking SQL Server for the result not telling it exactly what to run and it will often reorgnise queries before execution. Additionally the old argument between stored procedures and text queries was touched upon with the only benefits really being the amount of text over the network and the security issues of allowing direct modification of tables. Performance is not an issue as compiled plans of text queries are cached in SQL. The underlying theme was to check your queries using tools such as SQL Server Profiler in order to hone your query performance (whether it be through direct SQL, EF, Linq2Sql, nHibernate..). |
| Entity Framework - How to stop your DBA from having a heart attack | |
| Barry Dorrans (Soon to be Microsoft) |
As Barry is soon to be moving to Microsoft in the states his talk was somewhat hijacked by the DDD team with various videos leading to a rather jovial atmosphere for the final talk of the day. The content itself was very factual rather than contextualised to the day to day in the sense that the presentation did not really go in to real world examples, prefering instead to describe the variety of encryption/hashing options available to developers.
|
| A developers guide to encryption | |
Overall some excellent content with useful take aways.
