Yesterday I attended my first un-conference: UnKonf in Mannheim. Here is a short summary of the sessions I attended and the discussions before, during and after the talks. Thanks a lot to bitExpert for organizing this great event. To get an overview of all the sessions, you can take a look at joind.in and lanyrd.com.

Keynote - Developers Are Humans

Keynote speaker @skoop

  • What has a singer got to do with coding - quite a lot
  • UWCY - use what you can
    • Do not re-invent things over and over
    • Opposite of “Not invented here!”
  • Coding as art
  • Be proud of what you do

Ionic

  • Speaker Marcel Engelmann
  • Write Apps for multiple platforms ionic framework
  • Alternatives:
    • Phonegap: Develop Apps with HTML and JavaScript
      • There seem to be licensing issues
    • Apache Cordova: no licensing issues
  • Features and Usage
    • Start App with ionic start
    • Commands on command line
      • kickstart application
      • simulate application
      • start application (on device?)
  • Available platforms
    • android, ios, browser, amazon fireos, blackberry, firefox os
  • Ionic creator http://ionicframework.com/creator/
  • cordova plugins http://ngcordova.com/docs/plugins/
  • PhoneGap app for device testing http://phonegap.com/
  • Don’t use it, if
    • if performance is critical for your app
  • no internationlization in iconic so far?

Vagrant and Chef

  • Motivation for using Vagrant
    • Faster setup of development environments for (web) projects
    • Faster changeover time (switching between projects, swichting between project variants)
    • Easier collaboration with collegues (don’t just give them your code but the whole environment)
    • Follows the “You build it - you run it!” paradigm
  • Biggest problem: file performance on shared folders – blog post about file system performance
    • 4 possibilities
      • NFS shares
      • SMB shares
      • VirtualBox shared folders
      • rsync from host to virtual machine

Responsive Web Design ohne BreakPoints

  • Maintainability of CSS is a problem
  • What happens with Breakpoints:
    • Content is re-arranged
      • Changes in “best possible arrangement” might make content less useful
      • Might lead to UX problems
  • Alternative: Responsive Typography https://ia.net/de/know-how/responsive-typography-the-basics
    • Distance to the text is an important factor for readability
      • Reading-distance differs for different devices
    • Think about scaling of content instead of re-arranging and hiding
    • Aspect Ratio as an important criteria for content size
  • Use only one breakpoint: Landscape or Portrait
    • Only 2 designs left that you only have to scale - no re-arrangement of content anymore

VersionEye

Continuous Delivery, DevOps and Innovation

  • Introduction of Lean principles and their parallels in software development
  • Build, Measure, Learn Feedback Loop
  • Assembly Line = Delivery Pipeline
  • DevOps = minimize changeover time
  • Problems:
    • What happens if you are working in a client server environment and not only deliver a server application but a client application as well
    • How can you control updates of clients

Internet Of Things

Static with CMS

Nice idea of combining

as a static CMS. The main idea of the talk can be found here http://carrot.is/coding/static_cms.