Selenium Camp 2013 has been a great experience. Not only I hanged out with great people, but, for the first time in my life, I also got to savour a little bit of Ukraine in Kiev. VERY friendly people (really friendly). GREAT food. WELL-ORGANISED conference. What else could I ask for? My talk The title of my talk is Getting Started with GhostDriver (and my experience working on it!). UPDATE: here is the video: ...
I’m just back from a very good conference. And for once, I can proudly say, it was organized by Italians! The host were WEBdeBS, a web company based in lovely Brescia, and the topic was… very hot: Node.JS. Node.JS Conference (@nodejsconfit) (on joind.in) has been hosted in the Centro Paolo VI, where talks well complemented by lovely Italian food. What else can you ask? A great addition to my collection of “hackshirts” ...
A video that I need to watch myself (I just managed to watch 25% of it), but I thought was good to post it here: just to remind how good it is to think “out of the box”. Even in Programming Languages. Presenter: Rob Pike Presented on: 30th Oct 2009 Go is a new experimental systems programming language intended to make software development fast. Our goal is that a major Google binary should be buildable in a few seconds on a single machine. The language is concurrent, garbage-collected, and requires explicit declaration of dependencies. Simple syntax and a clean type system support a number of programming styles. For more on Go including FAQs, source code, libraries, and tutorials, please see:http://golang.org ...
That was pretty exciting. A free, big, enlightening event about the “Google Stuff”… Ok, ok. Who spoke with me here knows that it was NOT so enlightening: most of the knowledge they brought from USA is and was already available on the web. But that’s probably not the point. The point is, I believe, to share. Share the culture, the vision and… the APIs. The Venue: Wembley Stadium!!! I went there for mainly two topics: Android and AppEngine. About Android, the presenter, Mike Jennings, was very funny (and you will see him as the second presenter in the video below) and a “great character”. But his knowledge of the Platform was pretty basic. I believe he sort of Project Manager or something like that. Plus, in the second part they invited to do a “technical talk about the SDK” a guy, Carl-Gustaf Harroch. He is developing an application that involves a bit of LBS (Location Based Services) and some Google Maps. Ok nice, but he straggled quite soon with our questions about… almost everything of the SDK. And, yes, I was quite bastard with my own questions. Come one: how can you do a talk like that without even knowing “enough” what is the meaning of the Tags within the AndroidManifest.xml? He was even quite young and not very confident, and he was unable to introduce the basic concepts before talking about more complex and in deep stuff. At the end, quite disappointing session, I must say. Probably, I knew more about it :-P . The USB freebie ;) About AppEngine, I went to a “CodeLab”: a session where you are supposed to code. And I did, focusing more on my own Python code. They were available for help and questions, either about the application they proposed to build, or about your own. “In chair”, Mano Marks: confident. Probably too confident. But, at the end, he was helpful, even if an answer or two where quite “upsetting” (I mean: if I ask a question about something you don’t know, and I tell you that you are wrong, don’t be arrogant and confident; wait and see my proof!!!). Now, let’s see the Keynote: ...
About the news itself, I invite you to spend 2 minutes to read directly from the words of Eric Chu on the official blog. Said that, what is not defined yet (just the screenshot you see here) is Security. Better, what exactly they have in mind? Just put on the Market WHATEVER the developer will come with and leave to the final user the burden of reading, understanding and accepting/rejecting the application. Based on just some words written on a little screen? Words that sounds like C3PO? ...
Last 2/3 months I used a bit of my free time studying Android the so called “Google OS”, that is the result of the Open Handset Alliance. In this relatively short amount of time I had the possibility to collect information from the official sources, as well as from very interesting and active forums (like this one and this one). I had also the possibility to meet other experts during the Android Code Day event (here a summary what we did there). It was a very good place to ask important business related questions: I should say that the Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen was very keen to answer my tricky questions ;-) . Spending other words on this here is quite pointless: half of the web speaks about it (while the other half speaks about iPhone ;) ). But I would like to share part of the result of this study: * A Presentation: "Into the Android" [[PDF](http://downloads.detronizator.org/intotheandroid/Into the Android.pdf) | [HTML+Flash](http://downloads.detronizator.org/intotheandroid/Into the Android.html)] * Video #1: MWC - Android running on different ARM-based devices [[mp4](http://downloads.detronizator.org/intotheandroid/MWC - Android running on different ARM-based devices.mp4)] * Video #2: MWC - Android running on E2831 [[mp4](http://downloads.detronizator.org/intotheandroid/MWC - Android running on E2831.mp4)] * Source code of the Application I developed for study (actually, is just the [Tutorial](http://code.google.com/android/intro/tutorial.html) that comes with the [SDK](http://code.google.com/android/download.html) with much more internal documentation ;) ): [VSNotepad.tar.gz](http://downloads.detronizator.org/intotheandroid/VSNotepad.tar.gz). The presentation explains different details of the Development process using the code of this application as an example. The video are also on Youtube and embedded here after the jump. ...