Talks

• Amber Matthews - Your Code Is A Waste Of Time

  So much time is wasted building features - and then maintaining those features, or indeed rewriting them when things inevitably change - when the feature was never actually valuable or necessary. I go over the fundamentals of Lean UX and how to use some of the processes and tools to develop a greater understanding of your users requirements to help cut down on all the wasted effort.

• Andrew Medworth - Never Stop Scratching!

  My subtitle is "how to find your passion in life, and what to do if it's computing". The talk will explore how to find enjoyable meaningful work, and how we can improve our skills by "scratching personal itches", i.e. finding and working on problems that are important to us personally. This will be illustrated by an open source web app I am working on called Jianjin, to help me learn Chinese.

• Bart Verkoeijen - The SPA Treatment

  Explaining where web app development is going, and the current state of single page applications and client side MVC. Why frameworks like AngularJS and Ember are gaining so much popularity and practical tips on building solid web apps.

• Brendan Tang - Flow-based Programming

  This talk would focus on introduction of flow-based programming[1]. What is it? Why should programmers care? At the same time, I would also introduce some inspirations it could give to API design. In the end, I will show a demo of using flow-based programming in NoFlo.

• Hubert Lee & Angus Cheng - "Her" 0.0.1-alpha: Phoney Girlfriend

  Phoney Girlfriend is a choose-your-own-adventure meets Whatsapp RPG. In this talk, we discuss the idea behind the app, its technological underpinnings (specific Android concepts used in its implementation), market adoption and future directions.

• Jonas S Karlsson - Pandas don't worry about java we're in the cloud

  Panda is a new programming language. The main idea is to make the simple really simple and the complicated possible. You don't type loops or if and don't need recursion. It has an event-based evaluation with simple syntax. I'll introduce a simple but powerful cloud computing example. Bring your laptops or chrome browsers (mobile) and we'll use that instant cloud to mine panda gold!

• Matthew Lehner - Tradeoffs: Developer Productivity vs. Language Efficiency

  You'd never pick assembly as the language of choice for your next project, unless you're working on embedded software with extreme memory constraints. Most of us have climbed out of the dark ages of machine languages into something more comfortable like JavaScript, Ruby or Python, but in comparison to compiled languages, they're slow.

  As a community, we've accepted these tradeoffs because servers are cheap, and our time is not.

  But there must be a way that we can have our cake and eat it too, right? This is part of the reason that functional languages like Clojure, Scala and Erlang are becoming more common, but they don't initially address the issue of developer productivity.

  We'll look at Elixir as a productive, and efficient language, and why it might be a great choice for your next application.

• Michelle Sun & Pedro Pimentel - Teaching Kids to Code: From consumers to creators

  On our experience report we will show how we at First Code Academy are empowering the next generation of children on the usage of technology and turning them into creators. You will see the challenges (and the huge amounts of fun) we face when introducing computer science concepts, programming and design thinking for children, mostly aged between 8-15 years old.

• Mu-An Chiou - Design with code

  What does a "designer developer" do exactly? Not many people understand what we do, and there should be more of us. In this talk I will explain how the design process works through code, the technical side of designing with code, like tests and code quality, and how it made my team works better together.

• Richard Cohen - Where are our gadgets going?

  Phones and tablets and watches and face-computers and... Most of the computers sold in the world today are small and mobile. How did we get here? Where are we going? What is 'here' anyway?

• Sebastian Korfmann - Building Your Own PaaS with Docker

  We'll explore the ecosystem of Docker and how to leverage it to build your private Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are a few open source solutions worth considering, so we're going to take a look at the most popular solutions and compare them to identify the best fit for your scenario.