“Modern Company” session – uxebu as the example

But before I dive into the tech sessions I would like to mention that I really felt the need to hold a session which I had called “Modern Company” where I tried to show our philosophy at uxebu, how we work together, how we use the modern media, how it all came about and why we do it this way. First I didn’t know where to start. Then I started to talk about when and how the idea for uxebu came about, that we decided online to found it and really met some months later. Thanks to our open source background and our history we wanted to continue the same spirit inside the company, I tried to show how and based on what facts we grow our team (the word “hiring” seems such a one-sided process). I realize now that I forgot a lot of the good stuff, but maybe this is the chance to make this become a separate talk to hold at other events.
I really loved the discussion and the questions that it had started, notes had been taken, a lot of critical questions came up and had been answered by Tobias and me. One interesting mentioning came up about an article which mentioned a company that pays the same salary to all employees. Thank you for all this input, I really enjoyed it and will definitely talk about this more and will prepare some more info next time.

JavaScript – a topic of big interest

We had founded uxebu purely for doing JavaScript consulting and pushing the limits and it is just really exciting to see how much interest this language is gaining in the last years. Not only jsconf the mother of all JavaScript events underlines this but also a lot of other conferences and events like fullfrontal, fronteers, js1k, 10k Apart, jQueryConf and so on which Béla Varga listed in his “JavaScript Rock’n Roll” session.
The “node.js” session and “JavaScript Rock’n Roll” (by Béla (@netzzwerg) and Tobias Schneider (@tobeytailor)) made it very obvious that JavaScript is a hot topic, the BarCamp was not necessarily overcrowded with programmers, but still those two sessions had been very well filled and the discussions had been really fun. The conclusion of the “node.js” session that Tobias drew and evangelized was “node.js is currently very hyped and just not yet ready for production, so use at your own risk, it’s not even alpha yet”. Everybody also agreed that node.js is not the new saviour and a replacement for Apache, it’s another tool you should add to your tool belt, use it when it comes in handy and be sure to know how and when to use it. Final conclusion was, as usual, if you should use it depends on what you want to do :).
Béla opened up the “JavaScript Rock’n Roll” session by giving a very good overview of what toolkits exist out there, who created them and what they are good for. He very well layed out some of the advantages and disadvantages, the rough corners and what is hard and what easy to learn. Shortly the discussion about the right JavaScript IDE came up but as usual there is no one-fits-all solution, choose yourself! Everybody was very carefully listening when @tobeytailor dove deep into the details of ECMAScript, JavaScript, the differences, the latest specification, the changes, prototypes, __proto__ and so on. Other interesting topics in those sessions had been promotejs, vapor.js, details about storage mechanisms, jQueryMobile, embedJS, apparat.io
That was real “JavaScript Rock’n Roll”!

Native vs. Web

On Saturday, the first day of the BarCamp, I had offered a session “Mobile: Native vs. Web” but didn’t see too many hands raised, so I just didn’t put it in the schedule, later some people asked me when this session would take place and that I should hold it on Sunday, which I fortunately then did together with Florian Detig. And I have to say I am very glad we did so, because 1) we (at uxebu) have a lot of awesome stuff to talk about and 2) it was really fun interacting with the audience and passing on all this information. It is always amazing again how much there is to say about how to create an app which can also be submitted into any of the various app stores by just using web technologies (the adult industry proved that again). HTML, CSS and JavaScript are just way to underestimated for being of good use in the mobile world. Florian first showed his awesome slides (I think they are really cool!). I continued the talk and dove a bit deeper into the mobile web topic, after my try of explaining the different movements in the native API space with players like W3C’s DAP, BONDI, JIL, WAC we deeply went into answering and discussing web technologies on mobile devices, I talked about our experiences, showed some projects we realized and answered a couple questions.
Not really a surprise but still impressing was the positive feedback we got when I showed of apparat.io, our soon to be launched service that will be able to convert a web app into a native app (You want to know about it first – follow @apparatio). The release date for the private beta will be the 25th October 2010, people who follow @apparatio will get accounts first. I also showed our project embedJS a toolkit (based on dojo) optimized for mobile usage.

All in all the BarCamp just made it obvious again that we are playing in an very interesting field and that we at uxebu are pushing the limits, that is fun, as much as the BarCamp was big fun, we will be back next time, for sure!
Thanks again and keep up the good work!

Also I spent some time at the UXCamp in Berlin, this was another kind of BarCamp, topic-wise. Very interesting discussions about what front-end engineers and user interface designer see as their job description and area of work. It was really good to just get another view into the web world and step actually quite a bit away from programming, I can only recommend attending it.

Arrival
When I arrived there about 10:00 everybody started gathering in the cantine, I just had the time to grab a coffee and find Johannes to have at least someone I know :-). Then the introduction round started and everybody stood up said his/her name and tagged himself with three tags. It went much faster than you would expect. About 15 minutes I would say, for about 300 people. Impressive, especially the ping pong strategy was somehow cool, going from one end of the room to the other, which was possible with two microphones. I realized, when it was my turn (and I was almost the last one) nobody had yet used the tag “ajax”, so I stood up and said “I am Wolfram Kriesing form uxebu, and my tags are: ajax, javascript and dojo”. Ok, I had passed the first test.

dtrace
While all first time barcamper went to see a short session about how to barcamp Johannes showed me pretty impressive stuff you can do with dtrace. Just off of the top of his head he wrote a tiny script which just showed all “open” system calls, then we double clicked one of my files on the desktop and a hell lot of open calls were triggered, wow so much work for just looking at one file.
If you want to get the hands deep into the gears of your system for whatever reason dtrace is waiting to be used. I will definitely need to dive into it for a project we are developing at uxebu. Unfortunately it is only available on Solaris and Mac OS X. But hey, most web devs are working on Macs, and since that is a dev tool it could be pretty useful to many.

First two sessions
After introducing my two talks I went to see the session about the web in China, it was nice and interesting information, but of too little use for me. Right after this, first session we all had lunch. Then I went to “presentations with storyboard”, where Alexandra Graßler told us about how to do presentations best using a storyboard (some more info here). It was very good I think, not too much new stuff but good the storyboard part was the good thing. Building a logical tree for your presentation on which you “crawl” along with your arguments in order to lead the listener to the assumptions you are going to make. I just need to pick the cherries from it try and practice that.

My first session, Efficient JavaScript development
After that I had my two sessions, I guess two of the more technical sessions, which actually surprised me, but the number of listeners convinced me that there are interested techies there. Fortunately.
For the first session “Efficient JavaScript development” I got some interesting input regarding the direction of the talk. Matthias Gutjahr expected a bit more about how to write efficient JavaScript code. Right, the title might be a bit misleading. So I am trying to fix the direction of the talk, but I like the name and the wide range of possibilities it allows you to talk about. May be it pulls more people, then I only have to take care of meeting the expectations. I will try very hard! And since it was actually a subset and a test of what I want to talk about at the Ajax in Action 2008 in two weeks, it was a great first try. Thank you all for listening, the good questions and the input!

My second talk, dojo toolkit
The next session “dojo toolkit” right after the first one, was targetted purely on dojo. I had converted the slides just one hour before to be real uxebu slides – but hey, what has to be has to be! The always again upcoming questions were about cometd, cross domain handling and some dojo internals.
So I searched some URLs to show some of the examples that I may talked about or that target the mentioned topics.
One is babel chat, which Pete Higgins created and showed off a couple of times at the Ajax Experience in Boston. It’s a pretty neat application for showing off what cometd and dojo.data can do. You set your preferred language, log in and you can chat in your language, the answers come in your preferred language translated by google translate. We had a lot of fun with it, since the translations are often very funny. You know, the automatic translation stuff mostly sucks. But the show case is worth it with some extra fun included.
Another thing that Pete had also created in Boston was the faces demo “Create you own dojo javascript developer“. You can flip parts of the faces and choose from various developers. You will get a lot to laugh! There is even a hall of shame now, check it out! It uses dojox.fx.flip from Nicola Rizzo. Which allows you to flip layers and the cool thing about it is all done just by manipulating CSS properties.

This has already become a lot of text and because I am actually not a big friend of so much text I just stop it here and continue in a second article. (Or am I just too lazy right now :-)).

All pics form zerok, thanks!