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February 15, 2016 / by Melanie Haessler / Web developer / @codingCookie

DevFest 2015 - HH | a late recap

Would it be just another conference in these cold days?
NO - it would be 2 days of fun, meeting new people, try out new stuff…and yummy Pizza :)

The DevFest HH took place on November 5th + 6th, organized by GDG Hamburg, GDG Hamburg Android and GDG Hamburg Golang and was located at a very nice location - the betahaus2.0.

Thursday (Nov 5th)

In the afternoon we started with different workshops, like Golang 1+2, something about Web Performance, trying out Polymer or talk with a Beacon.

The Web Performance Workshop was a beginner-level (as announced) - so I only learned something new about http/2. (thanks Kim for the daily training on web performance s)

In the Polymer-Workshop I learned a lot of new stuff.
Polymer - another hipster-webstuff? YES :D and it’s cool :)
With Polymer you can build your own elements that can be reused in your HTML pages or you can take some from the Elements Catalog. Sandro explained the concept and told us a little bit about Polymer.
Afterwards we build a little Polymer App with Google Maps connection…..yay Sample from the Codelab

The last Workshop of the day (in one of the tree lanes) was about ‘talking to Beacons with Android’ - sadly the livecoding doesn’t work - but you can do some cool stuff with them (eg store a URL on it and via Bluetooth the beacon detects a smartphone and sends the URL to it - awesome…huh?).

Friday (Nov 6th)

The day was packed with talks splitted in 2 tracks.

Some of the Highlights:

The Web - Today and Tomorrow | Tim Roes | Slides | @tim_roes
I’m not sure if every developer knows about actual WebAPIs or how to use them - i didn’t - so I was very excited to hear more about it. We heard something about:

  • NotificationAPI - allows you to send desktop notifications to your users
  • Push API - gives web applications the ability to receive messages pushed to them from a server
  • different Storage Technologies
    • Locale Storage - client-side storage of significant amounts of structured data + high performance searches on this data using indexes
    • IndexedDB - client-side storage of significant amounts of structured data + high performance searches on this data using indexes
  • File API - provides information about files and allows to access their content
  • Geolocation API
  • Web Speech API - enables you to incorporate voice data into web apps
  • Web Audio API - powerful and versatile system for controlling audio on the Web (eg add effects to audio, create audio visualizations …)
  • WebGL - rendering interactive 3D and 2D graphics without the use of plug-ins (GitHub is able to render 3D models in your repository WOOOOWWWWW)
  • Gamepad API - defines an individual gamepad or other controller, allowing access to information such as button presses, axis positions - I already played a little bit with this API & it makes real fun - playing a nice little Flash-Game on your Laptop with a connected Controller - awesomeness incoming :) besides those WebAPIs he also spoke about using Service Worker for OFFLINEFÄHIGKEIT. aaaahhhhh

Responsive Testing with Galen | Martin Reinhardt | Slides | @mreinhardt | GitHub
Martin showed us how you can automate responsive testing with Galen Some notes from his talk:

  • import components
  • write spec-files
  • can take screens and compare them to elements on the page
  • works with Sauce Labs
  • GalenPages API - helps support basic interactions
  • don’t check every pixel

Maybe we could give it a try at work - we have 7(!!) portals to maintain. ;)

stick-to-finger fast 60fps | Kim Hogeling | Slides | @kimhogeling | GitHubof course :)
He told us everything about how browsers turn our code into pixels each frame, the 60 FPS goal, the RAIL Performance Model and why these things are so important - #perfmatters

Why you want to automate your mobile testing process | Maike Krüger | Slides
Maike told us why we maybe want to automate our mobile testing and talks about some tools- like cucumber, Appium, Genymotion, APPLAUSE. Some notes from her talk:

  • check after EVERY commit if every side of your application loads
  • confidence for developers
  • test early and often
  • begin with most critical cases

A real big advantage for me is the calming effect when you know your stuff is well tested before each deployment.

There’s an Polymer Element for that — but what if there isn’t? | Surma | Slides | @surmair | GitHub
He showed us what to do, if there isn’t an Polymer Element in the Catalog for something we want on our page.
Guess what - Right - create your own one :)
sidenote: the whole Google I/O App is written in Polymer (probable even more Google Products)

Polymer is the syntactic sugar to write Web Components

all good things come to an end

The DevFest HH ends with a little (maybe bigger) Pizza-Party in the betahaus2.0.
It was a well organized (thanks to GDG Hamburg,GDG Hamburg Android and GDG Hamburg Golang), nice, ‘little’, family-like conference with very interesting talks - I met old Friends and made also new ones - had nice talks - learned something new and was - again - motivated to try out some new stuff ;)

Would I join another DevFest? - sure!

some impressions (more Pics)

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