It's been a busy week after DEVit conf took place in Thessaloniki. Here are my impressions.
Sessions
I've started the day with the session called "Crack, Train, Fix, Release" by Chris Heilmann. While it was very interesting for some unknown reason I was expecting a talk more closely related to software testing. Unfortunately at the same time in the other room was a talk called "Integration Testing from the Trenches" by Nicolas Frankel which I missed.
At the end Chris answered the question "What to do about old versions of IE ?". And the answer pretty much was "Don't try to support everything, leave them with basic functionality so that users can achieve what they came for on your website. Don't put nice buttons b/c IE 6 users are not used to nice things and they get confused."
If you remember I had a similar question to Jeremy Keith at Bulgaria Web Summit last month and the answer was similar:
Q: Which one is Jeremy's favorite device/browser to develop for.
A: Your approach is wrong and instead we should be thinking in terms of what features are essential or non-essential for our websites and develop around features (if supported, if not supported) not around browsers!
Btw I did ask Chris if he knows Jeremy and he does.
After the coffee break there was "JavaScript ♥ Unicode" by Mathias Bynens which I saw last year at How Camp in Veliko Tarnovo so I just stopped by to say hi and went to listen to "The future of responsive web design: web component queries" by Nikos Zinas. As far as I understood Nikos is a local rock-star developer. I'm not much into web development but the opportunity to create your own HTML components (tags) looks very promising. I guess there will be more business coming for Telerik :).
I wanted to listen to "Live Productive Coder" by Heinz Kabutz but that one started in Greek so I switched the room for "iOS real time content modifications using websockets" by Benny Weingarten-Gabbay.
After lunch I went straight for "Introduction to Docker: What is it and why should I care?" by Ian Miell which IMO was the most interesting talk of the day. It wasn't very technical but managed to clear some of the mysticism around Docker and what it actually is. I tried to grab a few minutes of Ian's time and we found topics of common interest to talk about (Project Atomic anyone?) but later failed to find him and continue the talk. I guess I'll have to follow online.
Tim Perry with "Your Web Stack Would Betray You In An Instant" made a great show. The room was packed, I myself was actually standing the whole time. He described a series of failures across the entire web development stack which gave developers hard times patching and upgrading their services. The lesson: everything fails, be prepared!
The last talk I visited was "GitHub Automation" by Forbes Lindesay. It was more of an inspirational talk, rather than technical one. GitHub provides cool API so why not use it?
Organization
From what I know this is the first year of DEVit. For a first timer the team did great! I particularly liked the two coffee breaks before lunch and in the early afternoon and the sponsors pitches in between the main talks.
All talks were recorded but I have no idea what's happening with the videos!
I will definitely make a point of visiting Thessaloniki more often and follow the local IT and start-up scenes there. And tonight is Silicon Drinkabout which will be the official after party of DigitalK in Sofia.
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