What do you know - April 2014
Another great ‘What do you know’ session from Web Directions, lots of short talks, lots of short descriptions…
Matt Allen - A ‘good’ recruiter
Advice on how to make yourself more appealing to recruiters.
- Personalise letters, make yourself standard. Spelling and we’ll written.
- Don’t need to say all you do on a cv, or way back. Again, tweak, personalise, and make most relevant for role.
- Don’t apply for all roles, two or three on the go at any one time.
- Code tests are often quite easy, teach it like you are teaching.
- What do you want to do next?
- Why have you applied, give good answers
- Don’t say your last employer was crap
- Attitude over aptitude.
Tammy Butow - She hacks
Advice on running groups as well as an overview of engaging women in the tech industry and She Hacks.
Ask questions on sign ups from meetup group, reading responses to surveys. Export that data from for further analysis. In Girl Geek Dinners case it has been revealing, often open ended and varied.
Next event - she makes, 11th Oct
Deciding when What you know is wrong - Peter Wilson
Changing and moving on, learning. Things you know can become wrong with new techniques and practices emerging.. act like you’re always going live, you will make the right decision. Reread old code and articles. Don’t work in a vacuum and embrace change.
Pact - Beth skurrie
Moving away from large monolithic code bases into micro chunks. Throw away the integration tests, they can slow things down. Probably best you take a look at Pact’s GitHub for more details.
Maurio Visic, a faster web
Web is slow because of what we added to it… The visual additions of Netscape and the demands and extras we added, css, web fonts, images etc… slow sites impact conversion rates. To help use Web speed tests, Yslow, webpagetests, google etc… Start working on it now.
Innovating the open source business model, Shane from Silverstripe
Both client and developers want more for less. All open source communities say their advantage is the size of their community, the amount of modules they have and that everyone is using it. That’s what the others say… So Silverstripe do the opposite. Open Source vs proprietary, how do you differentiate, that’s the new argument. Personally, Silverstripe seem to offer similar things to other communities really, do they support developers who don’t work for them? Warranties etc aren’t anything new. premium support etc.
Typescript
Typed JavaScript. Good JavaScript generator. Classes, vars, semicolons. Nesting. www.typescriptlang.org
Bikeshedding - Drew from reactive
Clients often miss the big details and focus on small things like logo and colours. You need to feel the confidence to say “I know what I’m doing, I’m an expert”. Websites are hard projects. Why do clients do this? A loss of control, scared, they don’t understand what’s going on, help them through the process.
Webgl - Alex mackey
3d content onto web pages, take a look at Alex’s blog for more details.
Design by community - Dimitri
Don’t design at people. Be brave and democratic and Involve people. Give them clear tasks and timeliness on what to do. Take discussions piece by piece, remain focused. Pick passionate users and people with opinions. codesign, not committee, you can say no.
Windows Phone - Lars Klint
Awesome things about Windows Phone: Mixradio, cameras, Nokia… custom Uri mappings for settings. Lots of Google features out of the box, audio, codes, make you rich…