“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!

The conference day was just as interesting and though it was also a pretty cosy atmosphere (I would say about 250 people) one felt the difference to the day before, it was more on the business level but always mixed with the understanding for the young mobile industry it’s technical hurdles and the rough edges it still has, it was perfect too. Having tapas under the spanish sun was just as perfect as the content and the people there. The range of topics, no matter if in a panel or solo had been amazing and I am sure that everyone heard something interesting. For all the slides, and hopefully some videos watch the mobile2.0 site, pics are as usual on flickr.

The next mobile2.0 will probably be in San Francisco around October. See you there …

It was a simple macro for duplicating the currently selected piece of code. But since using it never made me think about it being a macro, and writing it was a piece of cake, and it just simply works – I never thought back and not even remembered that it was a macro. So, sorry for having that left out in my presentation, but I guess the empty slide also had it’s effect, right?

Besides holding talks, which occupies at least most of my brain time until I am done, we are really looking forward to getting to know better the AJAX Community here in Germany and we hope for a lot of input and to share ideas with like minded people. If there will be so much brain capital as there was in Boston for the Ajax Experience two weeks ago, we will need at least the rest of the year to digest it all. But hey, that is what we are out for. We want your input and we want to give input.

May be we will even try to have a gathering of some of the most interesting and most interested AJAX people that are coming to the conference in order to shoot a dojo.cast(), may be some kind of “conference edition”. Actually, that is just an idea I made up right this second while writing this, but I guess Nikolai and Pete won’t be too opposed to it.

Feel free to mail us or drop a comment if you like to meet up – no matter if dojo, ajax, javascript or whatever related.

Of course we were also hacking some. We just can’t avoid it, we are all three involved in very much the same things, mainly dojo. Though everyone has his specialties. Some dojo addicts including Nikolai are currently finalizing the work on the layout and styling stuff, in order to make dojo 1.2 a great success and, as Alex Russell coined the main goal, to make it a better user experience. Tobi and I we were discussing a lot and coding less for getting out a first version of the dojo integration into django. Stay tuned on this blog, there will be a release very very soon (I am talking about days, less than a week for sure). After hacking all the code Tobi is mainly finishing up documentation and getting some first input from the outside in order to make even the first release a good release.

This year there are some conferences coming up that we want to attend. For the Ajax in Action we have applied for a couple of talks and hopefully will be able to give some, we are waiting on the feedback.
But the biggest thing this year will definitely be the Ajax Experience in Boston, which is kicked off by the Dojo Developer Day. If you are coming along, be sure to join us the Saturday before the conference, we just thought it might be funny to grab some german beer (and food) in Boston, just need to reserve it once we know how many we will be. This will be exciting, we are looking forward to meeting a lot of the people we know from various online communications and we will surely get a loooot of very interesting input, and hopefully we can also give back a little bit.

And those are just some of the things that are currently going on …