I attended Øredev 2014 to present a talk with Ben Kelly on the relationship between testers and developers at eBay. The details of the talk we gave can be seen here.
Whilst at the conference, I took the opportunity to attend a number of other sessions. Øredev is a conference with a wide range of talks covering topics such as agile development, Java, .Net, testing, user experience and front-end development. As such, the sessions I attended were varied, although I did attend a fair number targetted at front-end development.
What follows is the first part of a three part series highlighting each of the sessions and talks that I attended.
Opening Keynote - Deconstructing Her - Chris Noessel - Cooper 🔗
Chris runs the sci-fi interfaces blog where he critiques the technological interfaces that are used in cinema and television, pointing out problems and suggesting improvements.
In the Keynote, Chris dissected the OS1 operating system from the film “Her”. The talk was insightful, and whilst the critique of the technology was interesting, what I found particularly interesting was the ethics that would be involved in producing and marketing such an advanced Artificial Intelligence. If the AI is really advanced as we’re led to believe, then is this a future form of Slavery?
Session 1: Web Components - Drunk on the Panacea -Angelina Fabbro - Mozilla 🔗
In this session, Angelina looked at one of the newest web technologies which support modern front-end development, web components. She focussed her talk on 4 areas, templates, html imports, the shadow dom and custom elements. For each part, Angelina gave some basic examples of how they could be used and then described some of the problems with the implementation.
Should we be diving into the use of web-components? I’m not so sure after this talk. I can see instances where some of the features might be useful, and libraries like Polymer (link) are a way of getting consistency in implementation but I think it’s still a way off yet.
Session 2: Yes, browsers can do that - Don’t be shy to use it - Christian Heilmann - Mozilla 🔗
One of the my main takeaways from this session was the need to simplify what we’re doing. Christian explained the way that over the years we’ve added more and more abstractions on top of native browser implementations, and now we’re paying the price as we’re adding tooling even more code to deal with the abstractions. If we think about our development another way, and look to the native browser implementations first then we might be able to build better products.
In this talk Christian focussed on a number of key technologies which are working well across most browsers (if you think of IE9 up).
Session 3: Twins - FP and OOP - Richard Warbuton 🔗
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and Java 8. What’s not to love?
Focussing on the SOLID principles, Richard showed how we don’t need to forget or abandon all of our tenants of good object oriented software design when we dive into functional programming. Good practices are good practices, and this talk demonstrated that when understood properly, we can see variations of the same practice applied in many different contexts.
I think my favourite part of the talk came at the end, when Richard equated the world of software development to the career of Arnie. I can certainly say that myself, and probably most of the audience for that fact, have never seen the correlation between the two before.
Closing Keynote: Deliberate advice from an accidental career - Dan North 🔗
Dan North closed the first day of Øredev with a variation of his “Deliberate Advice” talk. He examined snapshots in time through the interactions with people, and described how these things had helped shape his career to date.
It’s the first time that I’ve seen Dan speak, and I found him to be engaging and inspirational in the way he tells his story. There’s not really much more I can add to this, so I’ll let the video speak for itself.
