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

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 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.

Reviewing adobe edge newsletter, I found spectra news viewer which is a top system and usable in multiple ways, here is more information taken from msnbc website

Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.

• 
  Select msnbc.com topics from
  the news channel palette.
• 
  Your Channels manages
  active news topics.
• 
  Left, right or scrollbar flips
  through summaries and images.
• 
  View full content instantly with
  Full Story or later in NewsCollector.
• 
  Newscollector lets you save stories
  for later viewing.
• 
  Word Filter using search words
  or topic names.
• 
  Orbital Settings adjusts speeds
  and presentation order.
• 
  Auto Mode takes you on
  a 3D journey into the Orbital.
• 
  Use your webcam
  for human interaction.

Well It may not be literally new, but as any web technology introduced, it takes for something really cool and new time to be widely used (such as web standards, ). So I’ve been reading about this and you might want to take some time (a lot actually… I haven’t research them all but this post will help us all with some kind of guide for further reading).

Adoble Flex
http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/1a.+Learning+Points

SQLite
http://www.sqlite.org/

Adobe Air.
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/comparison/

Silverlight
http://www.silverlight.net

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

1. Photsynth: It needs an active x pluggin for Internet Explorer, but it’s like using something from the future now. The way the navigation goes through the 3d environment is great and the way I order photos in a 2d model is superb.
2. Google Maps – Live Maps: the entire map can be seen as a gigapixel image, street view is truly useful and the directions tools that both sites offer are a great way to show how web 2.0 apps are afecting nowadays rutine.
3. Google Reader: the best way to keep you updated, it has a high performance and forget about having to check manually every feed either in your browser or surfing page by page. In 5 minutes I can overview more than 80 feeds. Apart from the mail web systems, I thinks this is the most useful web software available for professionals.
4. Yahoo: the ultimate usability portal, well studied components which give the user a lot of information in one page.
5. Flickr: great community where people can actually know the whole world with high quality photos taken from great photographers. It has great sense of usability (yahoo trademark), and you can spend a whole afternoon using it in conjunction with the apps described at point 2.
6. Microsoft’s Hotmail: It’s fast to manage, I can do a lot of things faster than If I were using gmail or yahoo mail, it’s very intuitive with the “right click” options.
7. iGoogle: the extensions and the widgets offered are great, you can actually set your internet “dashboard” here.
8. Youtube: the ultimate web 2.0 site. Huge community, huge traffic, and very entertaining site.

Here there is a presentation about how Google Trifecta tools (optimizer, webmaster and analytics) can improve your web exposure and management.

From youtubes description:

Recording of the Google Trifecta webinar held on July 8, 2008. Speakers provide introductions to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer and answer common questions. Individually, each tool offers valuable and actionable information about specific aspects of your site; combined, you get a comprehensive understanding of both your visitors and your pages.

In the past, I wrote about the importance of forms and how to build them properly. In this article, from catswhocode.com , are presented some little but key features that can change user experience when using forms.

Some of them are:

• Calendar
• Web 2.0 form
• Resizable textarea
• Ajax login form
• Mootools Form Validation
• Custom checkboxes, radio buttons and select lists
• Multiple select
• Form Validator
• Textboxlist with autocompletion