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

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.

Time ago I heard about some ESPN & CSS thing going on. I remember something about ESPN saving terabytes a day in bandwitdh usage by using CSS for layout instead of tables.

So know I did some research and long story short:

• ESPN website gets about 1 to 1.3 billion page views per month.
• By using CSS…

• Page reduction (estimate) 50 KB
• Page views/day 40,000,000
• Projected bandwidth savings:

• 2 terabytes/day
• 61 terabytes/month
• 730 terabytes/year (784,000,000,000 KB)

So… switching from Tables to CSS styling is not such a little thing, and it takes tons of work when you change some existing website and try to migrate it to CSS layout. But the concept of just presentation and content-structure separation can make such an impact can tell you that you don’t need some costly data mining algorithms for getting some nice returns on investment.

Sources:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview