Øredev 2012 – 7 Nov

I am attending the Øredev Dev Conference this week. It is held in Malmö at Slagthuset, a former butcher factory. All sessions are recorded and will later be available at the website.  Here are some of my brief notes and photos from the sessions I enjoyed today;

Øredev

Øredev is the Premier developer’s conference in Europe focused on the whole software development process. Øredev means Quantity and Quality, bringing the best speakers on subjects such as Java, .Net, Project Management, Web development and Testing. We cover the topics you are working with today as well as the ones you will be using tomorrow!
Oredev.org

Mattias Georgson Petrén (CEO of Øredev), Steve Jennings (Host) & David Rowan (Opening keynote)

Software won – so what now?

You guys have won. Software is, as Mark Andreessen recently declared, eating the world. You are the emperors and are cutting through and reinventing industries one by one. But… let’s think about what comes next. What should your bigger legacy be? What should your minds and skillset be focused on now in order to solve the bigger, more meaningful problems that beset us? And how can the coder approach lead the world into an era of abundance, of iterative trouble-shooting, of optimal management of our resources – both physical and intellectual – in order to generate the greatest happiness for the greatest number?

David Rowan

David Rowans opening keynote is already online and well worth watching. It is a reminder about how we can use our skills to make a difference in the world and decide our own legacy. This topic can of course be applied to many professions, but our programming knowledge together with internet is a powerful combination.

David points out education, political and health as three special areas where we can help doing a talkoot. Khan Academy started by Salman Khan for helping his niece with her homework. It is now a giant non-profit educational organization. Rhok.org, hacking for humanity, is a community for developers creating practical open technology. Developersforgood.org is another example of how we can make a difference.

I set up a free Swedish forum last week for persons having the same eye disorder as me ,keratoconus, to make it easier for us to share info. This keynote motivated me to more “talkooting”.

 Stupid questions and n00bs

It really doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in this industry or which position you hold, understanding generation n00b and the value it brings should be mandatory for you. After asking a stupid question daily on the blog and interviewing hundreds of n00bs, employers, and teachers I’ve collected for you some rather intriguing and invaluable advice. In this unique narrated short film session I plan to shock, share and shine some light on your most valuable asset: gen. n00bs & stupid questions

Iris Classon

Iris used her 50 minutes to blow soap bubbles, do pushups, change clothes, read poetry and most important share her energy and view about how to see the value in new programmers and their curiosity to learn new things.

Her session’s main topic was divided into experience, curiosity and stereotypes. I wrote down four sentences I liked:

“Enable stupidity and you are on the right path”

“Communication is key, people is the most updated documentation”

“If you think you can or can’t, you probably right”

“It is just Hello World, but it means the World to me”

Unpicking the Microsoft Roadmap

Microsoft are spending quite a large amount of time and energy confusing everyone around whats in and what’s not in the next few years. In this session Scott will walk you through some of the announcements and show in detail how it affects developers with examples of how to reuse the current skills/technology you have with whats vNext. He’ll also give you some internal insights on how to navigate the next few years of technology roadmap confusion! Its opinated in some parts but will give you a better informed answer than “it depends” or “thats great feedback, lets take it offline”

Scott Barnes

Scott shares a lot of his insight in the Microsoft roadmap history and its challenges during his session. It is interesting to hear how Silverlight not was meant to be as big it became and they had no strategy for it. How Windows Phone 7 failed due to bad marketing and Expression Blend still is a horrible experience.

I joined this session to learn more about the future than the past. My mistake. At the same time we learn most from the history, right?

It is a bit uncomfortable but at the same time refreshing to realize that no one really knows how the industry and .NET future will look in just a few years.

Scott thinks Microsoft got their act together for the first time with Windows 8 and an important challenge is to get designers interested in and starting to work with it.

MVVM Applied in Windows Phone and Windows 8

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern is a common denominator between applications using XAML to create the user interface. In this session, Laurent Bugnion, the creator of the acclaimed MVVM Light Toolkit, will present best practices for XAML-based Windows Phone and Windows 8 application development, and how to leverage code and skills in Windows 8 too.

Laurent Bugnion

Laurent starts off with a short MVVM introduction. I can’t help it, but accents where “the” pronounces “tze” rocks. All slides will be available on his website.

Behaviors does not exist in Win8 (yet). Laurent shows a work around using a property and binding. Converters is not a favorite because they are slow.
He also show how to share code bases between a WP and Win8 Project, how to use states and how to get blendability with design-time data.

Laurent is the creator of MVVM Light. It is together with Caliburn Micro two of the most well-known frameworks supporting the Model – View – ViewModel pattern.

My mom told me that Git doesn’t scale

With over 2 million and a half repositories, GitHub is the world’s largest source code host. Since day one, we’ve faced an unique engineering problem: making terabytes of Git data always available, either directly or through our website. This talk offers a hopefully insightful view into the internals of Git, the way its original design affects our scalable architecture, and the many things we’ve learnt while solving this fascinating problem.

 

Vincent Marti

Hmmmmm, I did not know what session to go to at this time slot. I decided for this one because we use Git in my current customer project. I find source code management quite boring to be honest but Vincent made this the most fun session of the day. Watch this video when it is out on the homepage!

Vincent’s knowledge and humor leads us through how GitHub grown the last years and what steps they taken to secure its service. Ruby on rails were as an example a “problem” in the beginning. Why? They placed their repo on GitHub leading to much more users.

libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings.
libgit2.github.com

Libgit2 will help Git work better on Windows.

Git is optimized for code, not large assets.

One of Vincent’s advice is to let the revolution happen at front-end. Let them move fast and break while back-end must work all the time to not slow down the front-end.

What?!? C# Could Do That???

.NET 4 has brought us the DLR and C# 4 has brought us the dynamic keyword. With their powers combined, C# suddenly gets super powers! In this session Shay Friedman will show you surprising and practical things you can do with C#, the dynamic keyword, the DLR and Roslyn!

Shay Friedman

Shay showed some nifty dynamics examples in his session. These kind of sessions can become a bit tedious but he had a lot of positive energy.

Unfortunately I had a seat close to a spotlight. As a true programmer (or more true having keratoconus), my eyes can be very sensitive to light. This made it impossible for me to take notes, but at least I shot a nice photo of Shay.

I will probably watch the recorded session later to pick up the examples better.

Trackback URL: https://codeblog.silfversparre.com/2012/11/oredev-2012-day-1/trackback/