Nathaniel Schutta

Presentations

Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit

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The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.

The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.

Code Craft

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Despite what some developers think, we spend a lot more of our time reading code, code that was often written by someone that isn't around anymore. How do we deal with this common scenario without resorting to burning our predecessor in effigy? Better, how can we write code in such a way that our successors will heap effusive praise upon us at the mere mention of our name? During this talk, we'll read actual code discussing ways it could be improved. As we work through real examples, we'll explore the importance of patterns, principles like SOLID and SLAP and essential practices like unit testing and continuous integration.

Despite what some developers think, we spend a lot more of our time reading code, code that was often written by someone that isn't around anymore. How do we deal with this common scenario without resorting to burning our predecessor in effigy? Better, how can we write code in such a way that our successors will heap effusive praise upon us at the mere mention of our name? During this talk, we'll read actual code discussing ways it could be improved. As we work through real examples, we'll explore the importance of patterns, principles like SOLID and SLAP and essential practices like unit testing and continuous integration.

Agile UI

Day in and day out we are subjected to poorly designed applications. From those we experience directly to the time we waste waiting on others who are struggling with systems that seem like they were built to hinder the user. It doesn't have to be like this and many users are waking up and demanding better applications. Are you prepared to deliver? After this workshop, you will be. When you're done, you'll have the tools you need to make sure your application helps your users kick ass!

Usa-what now? While most developers are schooled in algorithms and programming languages, they often lack a grounding in the fundamentals of usability; we'll start by exploring what usability is dispelling many of the myths surrounding this misunderstood aspect of software. We'll show why usability matters and help you see how it can make the difference on your projects.

The who - developing pragmatic personas. We can't build a great UI without knowing who we're building it for. Personas are a time tested technique to help teams understand their users and facilitate building the right interface. While personas are often backed by extensive ethnographic research, they don't require months and months of effort. We'll explore the use of pragmatic personas to see how they can simplify the task of interface design. As an exercise, we'll develop personas for our application.

The what - figuring out just what to build. Of course just knowing who we're building for is only part of the picture, we have to know what our users are trying to do. Wether you favor use cases, user stories or more traditional requirements documents, at the end of the day our customers are using our application to further some other goal. In this section we'll discuss tasks and scenarios showing how they contribute to the overall design process. We'll write up a set of user goals expanding them into tasks that will help us design a set of interfaces.

The how - designing rocking good interfaces. Want to know the secret to designing great interfaces? We'll talk about the importance of iteration; just as our code is rarely right on the first try, neither are our interfaces. To facilitate the iterative process, we'll discuss the vital importance of paper prototyping. That's right, paper and pencil are your best tools. We'll also talk about why some designs are better than others discussing the heuristics that are second nature to the experienced designer. We'll also discuss design guidelines talking about how to make sure yours aren't just a dusty document sitting in a rarely visited corner of the LAN. We'll sketch up a variety of approaches focussing on quick and dirty designs that allow us to explore a plethora of options.

Testing our design - making sure we're on the right path. Just as we test our code, we must test our interfaces. While we may not have UIunit at our disposal, testing our UIs is just as important as testing our code. From recruiting users to preparing the space, we'll discuss how to get ready for a test. We'll talk about the various roles in a user test from the all important moderator to playing computer and taking notes. User tests can be very stressful, we'll discuss ways to put our customers at ease. We'll also discuss the best way to communicate the results of testing to the rest of your team. We'll prepare a deck to test a given scenario. We'll take that deck and test it with our "customers." Of course we can also desk check our interfaces using standard heuristics - we'll look at some existing applications discussing what was done right and what could be done better.

HTML5

Interested in HTML5? Want a change to play around with the latest and greatest in web app development? This workshop is for you! We'll cover feature detection, web forms, the new HTML elements, take a spin around the canvas, and we'll finish up with offline/local storage and web sockets.

Detecting 101 Before you can take advantage of a new HTML5 feature, you have to make sure a given browser can support it. This section will cover the basics of detection as well as getting the most out of rocking cool libraries like Modernizer. We'll also look at just what to do when a browser doesn't support a feature you're trying to leverage.

New elements Along with a new human type-able doctype, HTML5 introduces several new semantic elements. Recognizing that nearly every website in existence has a header, a footer and some navigation divs, HTML5 gives us a header, a footer and a nav element along with a few others. HTML5 seeks to pave cowpaths, not force the web to bend to its ways...

Canvas One of the most exciting features of HTML5 is the canvas, a space you can use to draw anything from shapes to text to, well, anything! From basic drawing to graphs to full fledged games, canvas opens up a whole new world of possibility, a world sans browser plugins.

Local Storage Web apps are, in many cases, indistinguishable from their thick client brethren, at least if you're not on an airplane. OK, so many planes have wifi, but there are parts of the world that don't have reliable Internet connections! Thanks to local storage and the offline API, all is not lost - you can create a web app that works offline.

Web sockets and web workers Ajax is like so many things in the web world - a simple (but very powerful) hack that isn't defined by a spec. With the advent of the web socket API, we'll finally have a native way to have bi-directional communication with the server. As we create richer and richer clients, we're writing more and more JavaScript. While the JS engines are getting faster and faster, there are cases where it'd be very handy to run scripts in the background. Web workers give us just such an opportunity.

jQuery Mobile

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. It needs to be polished and have that design stuff too. Oh and it needs to be on all the major platforms in time for the big marketing push next month. After a moment of panic, you wonder if it's too late to become a plumber but don't worry, there's hope! More and more developers are falling in love with the "write less do more" library and for good reason; it simplifies the job of today's front end engineer. But did you know jQuery could also help you with your mobile needs as well? That's right, jQuery Mobile is a touch optimized framework designed to provide a common look and feel across a wide variety of today's mot popular platforms. In this workshop, we'll take a look at all that jQuery Mobile has to offer and we'll convert a native application to an HTML5, jQuery Mobile masterpiece.

In this workshop, we'll build a mobile app taking advantage of everything jQuery Mobile and HTML5 have to offer. In this session, we'll take a look at: * pages * toolbars * buttons * form elements * list views

In the process of building out an app or two, we'll show you how jQuery Mobile simplifies the process of mobile app development.