Latest newsletter from my parent’s travels round europe 🙂
news letter no 32
The Rantings of the barely human.
Day 2 of the jQuery UK conference was the formal conference day with about 700 people in attendance.
It felt quite strange going to an open source conference for a none fringe project, particularly one that is treated as a product and used by many thousands of websites
On one side they do formal updates as you would expect from a corporation but as no one can fire them and they have no shareholders or such they can also tackle tricky subjects head on as well as take insults personally, which is a lovely change (although prone to a bit of ranting)
Much of conference context was very different to traditional corporate conferences due to the age of the attendees ( or rather the time they have been in IT) so they don’t have the history and background that many old farts have, as a presenter I am used to trying to pull people into this year (or even decade) while on the other hand dealing with people who have been programming computers since I was in nappies, in contrast this audience had a lot of people who are totally cutting edge but has only been in the business for a a few years (God I feel old).
The Good
The Less Good
⇓ Even though the actual conference was on an industrial estate, it was a very pretty industrial estate
⇑ Coo a full conference, not seen that in a while
⇑ The hardware hacking session was roll around on the floor funny, very well done and opened up lot of avenues that you can put your javascript knowledge to work with
⇑ The goodie bag was excellent, no waste and thankfully in a carrier bag so there was no need to chuck out another useless and crummy backpack, I even kept some of the bits of paper as they were informative not just shinny things for directors to read, the freebies offered by the vendors obviously did not come from marketing as they were actually useful,
AngularJS has been a library that I never really saw the point of, back end server languages + the excellent front end frameworks such as jQuery and bootstrap have always delivered far more than even my most demanding corporate clients could want or need, however while booking my ticket to the jQuery conference 2014 I noticed that one of the workshops being held beforehand was entitled ‘Diving into AngularJS’ I figured that perhaps I just did not appreciate the framework’s better points and I should man up and learn it, also the fact it was being presented by Peter Bacon Darwin a well known member of the AngularJS world and a published author was not going to hurt
Initially I thought I had made a mistake, there were lots of mistakes in the printed version of the exercises and a distinct lack of structure to the course, then I pulled the stick out my arse and started playing proper attention, the course was never designed to be completed in one day the material is a full course that you can do at your own leisure with all materials located on https://github.com/petebacondarwin/foodme, Peter was there to guide you over the tricky humps, answer your questions and WTF moments as well as give you the background reasoning to a lot of the baffling areas of angular,
The day was in microcosm an exact replica of the classic AngularJS learning curve –V and Peter’s presence was the reason for that, hopefully this means I wont hit this save curve on a live project
In additional it provided me with a personal epiphany when it comes to javascript, I have never really enjoyed the asynchronous nature of javascript, it never had the same control that I am used to with things like Java multi-threading or better still Scala’s Actors, but peter took me though the whole thing and introduced me to the https://github.com/kriskowal/q library and its AngularJS derivative $q, I had been using javascript promises the same as everyone else (even if we don’t call them that) but this really opened my eyes on the whole subject 🙂
Frankly put I learnt more than my brain can absorb in a day, very very good value
A young and apparently ordinary girl discovers that she can turn into a weapon, this is not as strange as it would seem as this is the world of the soul eaters where living weapons and their welders keep the mortal world safe from the forces of evil.
A slightly faded out version of the bright over the top colours you get with hyper anime like Naruto and Soul eater (the original) which suits this series perfectly.
So this is an off shoot of the original Soul Eater series and I love the idea of merging its crazy over the top world where everyone is class A personalities with a normal school anime allowing for the mix of both plot lines and styles
Bouncy pop tunes for both the opening and closing credits, I recon I will start skipping them from episode 5 onwards.
Well Soul Eater for a start but the plot line is very different so I would add in Daphne in the Brilliant Blue as the main character reminds me of her and just a smidgen of Working!!
This is quite a captivating little anime, its mix of normal in an over the top world has me eager for each episode, well done cameos from the original cast members sets it off nicely, top job to who ever came up with it
Disclaimer: These are mini reviews of anime’s that are fresh out in Japan and are not licensed in the UK, buy them once they have been licensed or at the very least buy the merchandise, remember if the anime makers make a loss, THEY WILL STOP MAKING ANIME!!