Keith Wedinger

When: Saturday, August 12th at 12:30 PM

Here is my list of recent observations, recommendations and other tidbits based on my web development work at a large retailer over the past several months.

On Friday May 5th, I attended StirTrek 2017 at the Schottenstein Center on the campus of Ohio State University. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this event, “Stir Trek is a one-day conference on May 5th, 2017 focused on teaching software developers, and others in the industry, the latest and greatest in technologies, techniques, and tools.” (from StirTrek 2017). Below is my recap of the conference as a whole and the sessions I attended.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend CodeMash 2017 at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, OH. For those not familiar, this is developer’s conference held each year in early January that is broken down into two major parts. The first two days feature pre-compiler sessions that last 4 hours each with a focus on hands on learning and activities. The last two days feature more traditional conference presentations, each lasting one hour. There is also an accompanying KidzMash with activities and sessions tailored to children which works out great for attendees who need/want to bring their families along. Approximately 2,000 people attend this conference with most of the attendees coming from Ohio and Michigan.

If you’ve done JavaScript development for any length of time, you are familiar with the huge amount of churn that occurs within the JavaScript framework landscape. This has been covered and panned extensively and is often a source of pain amongst the JavaScript development community. How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 is a perfect example of what JavaScript developers can and often do go through today.

I recently had a conversation with a good friend about the work we are currently doing. He told me that he is currently upgrading (i.e. rewriting) a web app to migrate from AngularJS 1 to AngularJS 2. When I asked my friend why this upgrade is being done, he stated that his client did not want to get stuck using an old version that is not supported. This immediately raised a red flag with me. This upgrade is not being done to solve a performance or functionality issue and it is not being done to introduce new functionality. It is being done solely to get to the latest version. And that spurred me to write this blog post.

During my career, I’ve discussed presenting at conferences with several of my colleagues. During these conversations, I am often asked, “How do I choose an interesting topic?”.

Over the course of my 26+ year career as a software developer, I’ve had the opportunity to work on many software projects for several companies. More often than not, I joined a team that was working on a project that started some time ago. When joining an ongoing project, one of the challenges I often faced was getting up to speed and being productive as quickly as possible. What made this significantly more difficult was the lack of good development project documentation. So, how do we solve this? Ultimately, new members are going to be brought on to help with a project. Or in consulting, the project is nearly complete and it is time to transition ongoing development and support of the project to our client. This is where effective development project documentation is an essential tool.

The link below is included in the latest O’Reilly Programming Newsletter. Like my previous Mastering Programming post, this link is concise, to the point and offers several good tips for all programmers.

I just read the Facebook post by Kent Beck below. Very concise and really good advise for all developers.

Welcome to my new blog which I got up and running very quickly using this excellent startup guide by Barry Clark. If you interested in starting your own blog using Jekyll with easy hosting on GitHub, be sure to check out the link above.