Development Blog: Viget Labs

Matt Henry, Former Staffer, March 14, 2011

This past Saturday, we held the first-ever MobileCampRDU event here at our Durham office. We had a great group of seasoned mobile pros as well as folks who came eager to learn about the emerging mobile technology scene. Here's a run-down of some of the awesome presentations/discussions we had:

Blake Watters from Two Toasters gave an intro to the RestKit framework. RestKit is a really useful tool for building iOS apps that interface with Rails apps (or any other JSON web service). It provides a really nice abstraction around communicating with the server, parsing the JSON data that get returned, and then persisting those data in Core Data. If you're building an iOS app that needs to talk to a JSON web service, you should absolutely look into RestKit.

Dirk Smith from OnWired led a really useful discussion about the frameworks available for building cross-platform native applications (e.g. PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium). While the conversation started with those frameworks and the difficulties inherent in using "write once run anywhere" tools on any platform, there was also a lot of general discussion about the relative merits of mobile web applications vs. native, platform-specific apps.

Viget's own Todd Moy gave a couple of short talks: one on the peculiar acrobatics involved in conducting usability tests on mobile sites/apps, and another on Luke Wroblewski's increasingly popular strategy of designing the mobile version of a website before tackling the desktop version. The so-called "mobile first" approach relies on the constraints of the mobile platform to help you focus on the most important aspects of your content and functionality. That focus can be invaluable in making a usable, engaging experience on your desktop site.

Dan Lee from IBM gave a really cool presentation about an iPhone game he's working on that leverages the Cocos2d framework for building iOS games. Cocos2d looks really powerful, but I was even more impressed by the lessons Dan learned from his experience in taking a little Flash word game and turning it into a fun, addictive iOS app.

Another IBM-er, WebKit hacker Patrick Mueller, presented his WeInRe (pronounced like "winery") project for debugging mobile web apps using the WebKit Inspector. Even though the project is still at a fairly early stage, with the features it has already, it looks extremely useful. As anybody who has tried debugging an app in Mobile Safari using its debug console will tell you, the mobile web app debugging situation is pretty dismal, so Mueller's efforts in that space are much appreciated.

I ended up reprising my talk on building mobile sites that support a wide range of devices that I gave at Refresh the Triangle back in November. The gospel of user-agent sniffing (as opposed to client-side feature-testing) feels less heretical now that it has been taken up by no less than Alex Russell since last time I gave the same talk, but I'll humbly suggest that the content was nonetheless worthwhile.

We ended the day with some more general roundtable discussion of what makes a good mobile app, which was a nice way to cap things off before heading to Fullsteam for post-camp happy hour.

All in all, it was a good day of useful presentations and group discussions. I imagine we'll probably do a similar event again this year (perhaps casting a wider net than just targeting developers). If you're interested in finding out when that will be, you can follow MobileCampRDU on Twitter.

Thanks to everyone who came, and everyone who pitched talks. See you all at the next MobileCampRDU!

 

Chris Jones, Developer, August 13, 2010

I'm a programming languages geek, so when Emerging Languages Camp was announced several months ago, I knew I had to attend. Viget was kind enough to send me, so for two days in July I was in programming language heaven. All of the talks were excellent; here are some of my personal highlights.

Continue reading "Highlights from Emerging Languages Camp"

David Eisinger, Senior Developer, July 29, 2010

On Saturday, August 14th, we’re taking the DevNation tour across the country for our first ever stop in the Bay Area. Our friends at Engine Yard will be hosting us for a day of talks, hacking, and discussion. The lineup is our finest to date, featuring, among others, speakers from Pivotal Labs, LinkedIn, Basho, and Yahoo! and capped off by a keynote from Chris Wanstrath (defunkt of GitHub fame). As always, breakfast and lunch will be provided.

If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you. Registration is only $50 if you sign by this Saturday, so save your money for the happy hour and sign up now.

Ben Scofield, Former Staffer, October 12, 2009

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these developers from the swift completion of their appointed conference. As it so happened, we experienced two of those obstacles at Developer Day Boulder this past weekend – Boulder got its first snowfall of the year the night before, and the TechStars bunker got extremely warm as the day progressed (in seeming defiance of the sub-freezing temperatures outside).

We had great attendance despite the difficult conditions, and those who made it enjoyed the event a great deal. Chad Fowler started us off with a discussion of creating a remarkable life, and (judging from the tweets I saw fly by) inspired a number of the listeners to take more control of their experiences.

Chris Perkins followed Chad, and gave us a thorough introduction to TurboGears and the state of the Python web community. From there, we moved on to Rob Sanheim's talk about the cloud, and I saw my first ever live-deploy (live-coding is so last year). Jeremy Hinegardner then closed out the morning session by discussing a number of tools that work well in mixed-language environments.

After lunch, we had a great series of lightning talks. David Eisinger premiered his Introduction to Ruby and Mid-90s Hip Hop for the public, Jason Turner showed off ChaiScript, Ben Reubenstein talked about donating time and talent to worthy causes, Bobby Wilson railed against the current state of templating systems in Ruby, Jess Martin describe the One True Way of CSS, and I talked a little bit about how the comics industry is difficult to model in a relational database.

The afternoon session then continued with David Eisinger, back up to explore email as an interface. Derek Chen-Becker was next up, with an introduction to Scala and a brief demo of Lift, the Scala web framework. We then shifted to the mobile and desktop worlds, with Bill Dudney and a talk about CoreAnimation. Finally, Bruce Eckel closed us out with his perspective of the evolution of features in C++, Java, and Python.

All in all, this was another successful Developer Day, and we're excited to start planning for 2010. If you'd like to see us come to your area and showcase the various developer communities, feel free to leave a comment here or email me at bscofield@developer-day.com. Viva la Developer Day!

* Note: We'll be posting the speakers' slides to their SpeakerRate pages and to the Developer Day Boulder page as we get them in.

Patrick Reagan, Development Director, September 28, 2009

This past Saturday we hosted the second Hackday at the Viget Labs office (photos). For this event, Matt and I focused on the tools and techniques for testing that we often use when developing Rails applications. Since the Hackday format is one of collaborative teaching and discussion, we decided to build a micro-app from scratch during a pair-programming session.

The topic for the day was a logical progression from our previous event on controller refactoring as testing is a critical component of any reliable refactoring activity. We spent some time covering the standard testing facilities in Rails and went on to discuss mocking, stubbing, object factories, and other testing libraries for use in Ruby and Rails projects.

The three-hour timeframe was sufficient to scratch the surface of these topics, but didn't allow us to get too deep in any one area. In order to bridge the gap between what we covered during the day and the final application, we've made the full application code and tests available on GitHub. We've also provided a list of links to some of the tools we discussed during the day.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the event – we hope to see you all at the next Hack Night.