codebar Monthly
November 28th was the last codebar Monthly of the year and I was happy to attend and frankly quite surprised how I never actually went before. For some reason I always concluded that those who have some years of coding experience will get the most out of Monthlies, it turns out, 1. this is not the case, 2. even with little coding knowledge most of the talks absolutely made sense to me. So, let’s see them.
First we had a super interesting talk from Rabea about Progressive Web Apps.
Based on this definition…
“A Progressive Web App uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience. They evolve from pages in browser tabs to immersive, top-level apps, maintaining the web’s low friction at every moment.” (Addy Osmani)
…PWAs have some cool characteristics, such as:
- Home screen access
- Full screen mode
- Splash screen
- Push notifications
- Exists in android app switcher
- Works offline
They have some other pros and also cons:
- Responsiveness
- Linkable
- No app stores
- Browser support — only Chrome and Opera
- Complexity
The process of these apps are a bit complex but not that complex to be honest. This includes a web app manifest, service workers, background scripts, front end technologies and a proxy between your client app and the network. One coolness is that it can manage a cache of responses. So after hearing about them the first time, I kinda want to make one now. :)
Second we had a talk about Defensive Programming in @quii ‘s presentation. The talk was quite funny but also managed to point out that only sometimes it seems that programming is fun, challenging, and rewarding, whereas most of the time it is tedious and frustrating, especially when we are not sure whether our code is helping or hindering us. Accidental complexity is a productivity killer and should be avoided at all costs. Chris argued that instead of programme defensively, we should use tools like type checking and TDD to avoid the mistakes that can come from using dynamically typed languages. He also argued for learning and using functional languages as these can reduce the number of these mistakes.
Third we had an intro to RAM from Mollie Stephenson. I will be honest, I understand as much about RAMs and Hardware as a day old chicken about farming, so I felt I had no idea what was going on, but the presenter is my role model, as she seemed very much on top of her RAM game. I hope one day I will slay in the territory of hardware too, not that I am slaying a lot right now in software (my tests are pretty sensitive this weekend, yay TDD). Anyway, we heard about combinational chips, computing boolean functions, sequential chips, memory, the concept of time and about registers.
Fourth we had @elibelly talking about Naming Things and how hard it actually is. To sum up, our class names, methods, everything in code has to have a descriptive, meaningful, and contextual name. This is important so other developers, and we, our future selves will understand how and why we named things the way we did so. Highly recommended book on the topic: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin. Alternatively you can browse through her slides too.
Fifth, and this was our closing talk, we got to know more about Open Source and how to get into contributing to Open Source. To cite Charlotte Spencer, Open Source is pretty much FREE CODE!
It is highly recommended to:
- explore Github Projects
- to contribute to something you use every day
- to start your own project
- collaborate with friends
- follow developers, open source contributors
- just make your first PULL REQUEST
Because every contribution matters, even the smallest one, so start small and take it from there. If you missed the codebar 24 Pull Request event, keep an eye out, there will be more of these.
See you all next year, I had a lot of fun! ❤
Editor’s note: the November 2016 edition of codebar Monthlies was generously hosted by unruly
