Software Engineer

This is a summary of some presentations given yesterday, congratulations to the people that worked on TechCamp

Scrum

Speaker: @agilenature

The scrum presentation reinforces our knowledge about the set of assets (such as the backlog, burn down charts,etc) and actions required to manage a project.

The definitions or scrum roles (product owner, scrum master, developer, tester), the required actions (stand up meetings, effort estimation) can help us to better face a project as a cohesive team and better manage those projects where complexity is high due to not fully understood requirements and/or unknown technology needed to satisfy product objectives.

The main objectives are:

* Give the project visibility (stakeholders have from the beginning a clear state of the project progress)
* Get rid of uncertainty (the product owner is highly involved in the project)
* Manage change.

Since scrum is a extensive topic, the presenter gave us several topics that we can research for further knowledge about the methodology, such as:

Further reading:

• Scrum in 10 minutes .
• Stakeholder management.
• “Poker” effort estimation.

Appcelerator

Speaker: @yeco

It talked about the Appcelerator Titanium Mobile which is a framework for building professional-grade applications for the iPhone and Android.

Titanium Mobile offers a way to create native mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. There is access to all native features, like geo-location, local filesystem and database access, and multi-touch and accelerometer controls, but without having to write native code. And because it’s cross-platform, a single codebase will work for both the iPhone and Android Phones.

Further reading:

• http://www.appcelerator.com/
• http://www.codestrong.com/timobile/

Firefox Add-on development

The presentation wasn’t about how to develop an add-on for firefox, but it gave a general perspective about the development process and the Mozilla Foundation effort to offer high quality addons by checking and reviewing every development posted here: https://addons.mozilla.org/

The speaker talked about the business opportunity because there are not many companies developing Firefox add-ons and this software has a lot of potential to enhance user experience and productivity when surfing the web.

As for the career path for a Add-on Developer, the speaker talked about his and how it went from being a contributor in 2001 to a Mozilla employee.

Further reading:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developers

Speaker: Jorge@mozilla.org

HTML5 & CSS3

The html is going to make web pages more semantic and browsers will provide more functionality making pages more lightweight even when there is video/audio streaming so HTML5 aims to reduce the use of proprietary plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash.

HTML5 provides new elements that reflect typical usage on current web pages. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of
element, such as (website navigation block), and . There is new functionality through a standardized interface, such as the and elements.

There are dropped elements including purely presentational elements such as and
, whose effects are achieved using CSS.

Further reading:

• http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

This a nice & short article: “Micro Optimizations That Matter” by Brandon Savage.

It’s like roadmap to optimize your web applications rather than the php code by itself, “micro” tricks that can definitely impact performance positively.

The best answers come from measurable data, don’t let the “I think that “, “I believe”, “IF…” drive your decisions when it comes to performance.

Where to look? Well, don’t try to reinvent the wheel, there are plenty of tools that can provide enough data so you can make informed decisions regarding mysql performance.

SQL Performance Tips: There is lack on benchmarks about most of the suggestions here, still, many of them are obvious and can help you about what to test.

How to profile a query in mysql: this is self explanatory

Using the New MySQL Query Profiler: SQL diagnostic tool that assists in the debugging and analysis of running SQL.

There two new semantic search engines around: Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared (yet to be released)

Here’s a hands on of google squared

Here is an excelent php frameworks overview

Here is some information regarding html5 that I’ve found surfing the web. Regards

Taken from google webmaster blog, here is a brief but useful info about descriptive anchors in links:

To see all our basketball videos, click here for the entire listing.

However, instead of the generic “click here,” you could rewrite the anchor text more descriptively as:

Feel free to browse all of our basketball videos.

So, I think we should avoid those “more info…”, “view more…” links.

Here is some introduction about this project from mozilla labs

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Here some useful tools for web applications:

1. Ajax loading application: here is some nice feature for web developers that allow us to create some animated gifs which can be used when some ajax request is in process. Why is it important? Because we’re showing the user that something is actually happening when she/he has requested something and there is a waiting time needed to show the expected results.
2. Tiled backgrounds designer: web designers can used this to generate some professional backgrounds with patterns that now is a trend. Apart from being useful, it’s a nicely developed web 2.0 application since you can post your background, there is community sharing and voting and it’s a usable and efficient application. It will definitely rank in my choice for web applications

Smashing magazine published this great article about seven principles of clean and optimized css, which covers the following topics:

1. Use Shorthand
2. Axe the Hacks
3. Use whitespace wisely
4. Prune frameworks and resets
5. Future-proof your CSS
6. Document your work
7. Make use of compression

As usual, it has tons of references worthy to check, for instante here from Eric Meyer’s Reset, and his reasoning about why we should reset the css attributes.