1. Workshops
  2. The Future of APIs
  3. Web and App Development
  4. Mobile Development
  5. Startups and Innovators

Conference Day 1

Thursday, November 21st

  1. 9:00am - 9:05am

    Welcome

    Ian Murphy

    Welcome to the Ultimate Developer Event!

  2. 9:05am - 9:45am

    Keynote - The Future: Zombies, Robots & Ice Cream

    Cali Lewis and John P.

    VHS dominated for nearly 25 years. DVD for a decade. Today the entire collection at Netflix can be had for $8 a month. And if history is a good predictor of the future, all of this will be gone in a decade if not sooner! Same goes for all the latest technologies: Gesture control. Wearable technology. The Connected Home. Google Glass. Induction Charging. Smart health devices. Or does it? Technology gurus Cali Lewis and John P. from GeekBeat.TV give you a sneak peek into the future! What will the world look like in a decade? And most importantly, will there still be ice cream - or will the zombies eat it all?

  3. 9:55am - 10:35am

    The Frameworks of Tomorrow

    Mark Otto

    Frameworks have long been an important part of building on the Web. Tools of all shapes and sizes have become common place within our design and development processes, and their prominence shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, we’ll continue to see more and more frameworks in the near future, but perhaps not in the same vein as those of today. Nearly two years ago, the type of frameworks we use dramatically changed, and they’ll do the same again in the near future. We’ll take a brief look back through not only the evolution of front-end frameworks, but where they may be heading in the next couple years—and how to prepare yourself for them today.

  4. A photo of Steve Marx
    11:05am - 11:45am

    Cloud Storage for App Developers

    Steve Marx

    It’s more important than ever to create apps that provide an amazing user experience across multiple platforms, devices, and even offline. Even though saving data in cloud storage is becoming ubiquitous, it's still difficult for developers to manage user authentication, syncing, and caching. In this session, you'll learn how Dropbox approaches these challenges and explore the developer tools available on the Dropbox platform.

  5. 11:55am - 12:25pm

    Spotlight Session

    Speaker to be Announced
  6. 2:00pm - 2:40pm

    Hackers Gotta Hack

    Jessey White-Cinis

    Being a full-stack developer in today's start-up landscape means that you'll likely be in high demand, will be prototyping constantly, and will frequently be wearing many hats. In this talk, Jessey will teach you how to choose the right projects to work on, how to "write bad code the right way," how to work effectively with others, and how to make yourself more valuable as a programmer, team-member, and technical founder.

  7. 2:50pm - 3:30pm

    Up and Running with Twitter Bootstrap

    Jen Kramer

    Twitter Bootstrap is one of the most popular responsive design frameworks in use today. What makes it so special? Learn what Bootstrap is, how to configure it to get started, discover the grid system, get an overview of styling and LESS configurations, learn about navigation options and Javascript plugins, and much more.

  8. 4:00pm - 4:40pm

    An Introduction to the Tornado Application Framework

    Chris Lea

    Asynchronous network programming is all the rage these days, and you want to be one of the cool kids, right? Tornado is a web framework and networking library originally built to power FriendFeed. It was open sourced by Facebook after the acquisition, and has matured considerably with a healthy developer community. Tornado allows you to easily write asynchronous applications with all the power and beauty of Python at your side. In this talk, we'll go over Tornado basics such as handling GET and POST requests, but we'll also touch on some more advanced features such as templating and security. We'll also do a quick comparison to some other notable frameworks such as Node.js and Flask. You should leave with a good understanding of how to get started with Tornado for your own projects.

  9. 4:50pm - 5:30pm

    Keynote - "It Depends" Is Not an Answer

    Russ Reeder

    What does a successful next-gen web developer look like and how do they achieve success and keep building on it? Russell Reeder, President and COO of web hosting and cloud services provider (mt) Media Temple, will share insightful business advice that will help web developers take charge to reach ultimate success. Reeder will talk about why “It Depends” is neither an acceptable answer nor a winning state of mind, and why developers should put their business hat on when they approach their work. He will then walk the audience through different scenarios to show that, when developers put blinders on, they are not aiming for success, but for failure. Through collaboration with all elements of the business, developers can be the key to sustainable success. Reeder will also explain how developers should look beyond the code and identify the problem they are addressing. How? By fully understanding their competitive advantage and the market they are targeting.

Conference Day 2

Friday, November 22nd

  1. 9:00am - 9:05am

    Welcome

    Ian Murphy

    Welcome to Day Two!

  2. 9:05am - 9:45am

    How Consumers Engage with Apps

    Jamie Turner

    Apps come in many forms - games, e-commerce platforms, educational tools and many other variations. But critical to any app is understanding how consumers engage with apps and the companies that create them. Jamie Turner will take you on an interesting and engaging exploration of how humans connect with businesses via apps and what makes some apps succeed while others fail, with special attention paid to monetizing apps and trends and strategies for creating business apps.

  3. 9:55am - 10:35am

    Closing the Documentation Loop

    Ana Nelson

    While testing is now generally acknowledged as a core component in an iterative development process, documentation is still frequently relegated to an afterthought, or delegated outside of the development team. With the right tools, however, documentation can become an integral part of the process. Dexy is an open source, developer-oriented command-line tool for generating documentation based on live code. This talk will cover using dexy as part of an iterative development approach where source code, tests, and documentation are all written throughout the development cycle, and each provides feedback for the others. Documentation is backed by tests, code is improved by writing about it, and live code examples mean that documentation won't go silently out of date. Learn how to make writing documentation not only less painful, but more valuable.

  4. 11:05am - 11:45am

    Not Invented There: Things Rails Didn't Innovate

    Caleb Thompson

    Rails is a mixture of design patterns, practices, and magic. In this talk, we'll explore how Rails embraces ideas from other frameworks and projects. Active Record was born of Martin Fowler. MVC was the brainchild of Trygve Reenskaug. Rails 3 completely absorbed the Merb project, gaining modularity and extensibility that it previously lacked. We all learn by standing on the shoulders of giants, even Rails. By understanding the inception of design patterns, we are more likely to be able to create ideas of our own. This helps us to not only grow in our own ability, but to help others improve as well.

  5. 11:55am - 12:25pm

    Spotlight Session

    Speaker to be Announced
  6. 2:00pm - 2:40pm

    Vim: An Old Tool for Modern Web Dev

    Chris Toomey

    Vim is a text editor that is, depending on how you count, between 20 and 40 years old. What place does it have in the tool set of modern web dev? At its core Vim was designed with a sole focus on editing text, and at this job it absolutely excels. Vim is highly adaptable to the constantly changing collection of languages used in web dev, and opens itself up to extension through an ever-growing community of plugins providing functionality rivaling single purpose editors and IDEs. This talk will provide an overview of what makes Vim unique, and why it continues to be the most efficient editor out there.

  7. 2:50pm - 3:30pm

    Continuum Between IaaS and PaaS: Finding the Sweet Spot

    Julia Ferraioli

    PaaS can give you the ultimate in productivity - you focus on writing the differentiated code that your application needs to be successful, while not worrying about the boilerplate services, system administration and more. IaaS typically provides vanilla virtual machines - you have the ultimate in flexibility, but there can also be a lot of configuration / management overhead. This talk will explore how we find the sweet spot on the continuum between these two models.

  8. 4:00pm - 4:40pm

    The Importance of Face-to-Face Time

    Adam Roben

    Open source projects have shown that teams can be incredibly productive even when spread across different time zones and continents. Companies have learned from this and are increasingly allowing their employees to work from home, wherever that may be. This allows them to attract the very best developers, designers, salespeople, executives, etc., regardless of their living situation. But a far-flung team comes with a cost. Purely electronic communication, whether via email, chat, bug trackers, or even video conferencing, easily leads to misinterpretation, stifled thoughts, nit-picking, lack of camaraderie, and worse. When all your communication is textual, it's far too easy to assume the worst in others, rather than the best. Don't despair! There's an easy solution: face-to-face time. Talking and hanging out in person for even a few days reminds us that we're all warm-blooded humans with good intentions and puts our interactions back on the right track. Come hear how we've made this a big part of how we work, both in the WebKit open source project, and at GitHub.

  9. 4:50pm - 5:30pm

    Keynote - Automotive Connectivity: More Than Just a Phone with Wheels

    Nick Pudar

    Automakers are re-thinking their structure and business models to move in-sync with the broader connected ecosystem and consumer trends. GM's dev kit will expand access to the infotainment environment, bringing developers new ways to make money on their apps. It's a flexible software framework that includes HTML5 and JavaScript. We don't want you to build apps for today's vehicle; we're looking for apps that will be fresh well into the future.

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