unkonf 2015

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
  • Culture of asking
  • Using kickstarter instead of record company
  • Book from Amanda Palmer “The Art of Asking”
• 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/
  • ionic 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

• VersionEye notifies you about outdated dependencies in your software projects
• http://versioneye.com
• “License Distribution in Github projects”
  • https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/
  • http://choosealicense.com/
  • https://github.com/blog/1530-choosing-an-open-source-license
  • https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com
• Further Tools https://www.blackducksoftware.com/

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

• There is a MongoDB meetup in Mannheim http://www.twitter.com/MongoDbMannheim
• http://www.twitter.com/opotoc

Static with CMS

Nice idea of combining

• Contentful
• Roots
• Netlify

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