Picks of the month – September 2015

Posted by Gjermund Bjaanes on September 25, 2015

Welcome to Picks of the month, where I share a few things I have found useful the last month.

It can be anything from blog posts and software tools to books and techniques.

#1 Meteor.js

Meteor.js logo

 

Meteor.js is a very nice platform for creating web apps (and actually mobile apps as well). It’s super fast to get started and it’s really easy to achieve a lot of cool things.

Meteor allows you to write isomorphic javascript, which means the code you write can run on both the client and the server. It’s a really neat concept.

One of its other big features is live updates, which makes data update on all clients and server automatically. For example, if one client changes some data, it will be shown on all other clients as well. It allows for super cool stuff written really fast.

Take a look at: https://www.meteor.com/

 

#2 React

React logo

 

 

I recently attended a workshop where I learned a bit of React. It is super fun! I love how easy it is to write small components and put them together.

Most people doing web has at least heard about React, and if you haven’t tried it out already, I highly recommend that you do.

Read more about it here: https://facebook.github.io/react/

 

#3 Conferences (JavaZone in particular)

JavaZone logo

 

I attended my first “face-to-face” conference (not online) in Oslo this month, and it was incredible! I loved meeting fellow developers and talking to them about coding and stuff!

JavaZone is not all about Java. In fact most talks I went to were not Java specific. Most of them were in English as well! And all the talks are out online for you to watch!

Take a look if you want to check out the talks:

http://2015.javazone.no/program.html

It was awesome to spend 2 entire days just learning about new things! The next pick is actually from that very conference.

 

#4 How to make your code sustainable - what they don’t teach you - Christin Gorman

Christin Gorman is a norwegian developer and she is extremely energetic! Her talks are fast paced, very insightful, and also quite funny!

This talk was about code sustainability. She questions a lot of “standards” in the industry (for instance, why the hell do you need an interface when you almost always only have one implementation of that interface??).

The talk got me all inspired and I sent it around to almost everyone at my company. I hope you can get as inspired as well.

Enjoy!

How to make your code sustainable - what they don't teach you - Christin Gorman from JavaZone on Vimeo.


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