Next Teaching Engagements

During winter 2015/16 I will deliver inhouse courses about development with JavaScript and AngularJS to teams at Puzzle ITC, mtrail GmbH, Mobiliar, Postfinance and SBB.

I will also deliver public courses for DigiComp and TechTalk:

At DigiComp my next course “Frontend-Entwicklung mit AngularJS” is scheduled for December 17th & 18th 2015 in Bern.
There are already enough registrations so that the course is guaranteed to take place, but there is still room for more participants …

I am delivering a three day course “Front-End Development with JavaScript, AngularJS and Visual Studio 2015” for TechTalk.
The course will take place:
- November 16th - 18th 2015 in Vienna
- January 25th - 27th 2016 in Zürich
… there are still places left.

Update 2015-12-01: Here is a nice summary from a participant of the course in Vienna.

Weekend Reader, Week 43

Angular Connect

Last Week was the Angular Connect conference in London.
Unfortunately Angular 2 is still alpha … the highly awaited beta version was not released at the conference.
Besides Angular 2, TypeScript and Reactive Extensions seem to be the technologies that you should start to look into for future develoment with Angular.
The sessions are available on YouTube, I am still catching up, but the qualtity of most sessions is very high.

The Angular team also updated the docs for Angular 2, definitely worth looking at …

JavaScript Community in Bern

Next Meetup of “Bärner JS Talks” is on November 25th.
Next Frontend Pizza is on November 3rd.

Don’t base your business on a paid app

The App and Play stores have turned out to be exceptionally poor places to run a software product business for most developers.

DHH (the creator of Ruby on Rails) argues against the myth of profitability of mobile app development today. Apps are a great distribution channels for services, but they are not the product you should try to make money with.

SVG Porn

Nice logos made with SVG.

A cartoon guide to Flux

Flux is not easy to grasp. This illustrated guide is a funny intro into the pattern.

The State of JavaScript on Android

the fastest known Android device available today performs 5× slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5

The post is highly interesting. It seems that iOS users are much better off using modern web sites and the Android ecosystem is actually threatening to hold back the progress of web technologies …

Is Eclipse Dying?

Eclipse is not the shiny thing every developer loves any more … but is it really that bad and is the predominant IDE dying?

Video: Web Development in 2020

Web Development in 2020 - Steve Sanderson from NDC Conferences on Vimeo.

Steve Sanderson looks into future trends of Web Development.
An interesting Presentation with a very funny intro.

Tweets of the Week

Why do (enterprise) projects try to behave like a startup? 95% of all startups fail.

— Roman Bertolami (@bertolami) October 21, 2015

Whether or not 10x engineers exist, 1/10th organizations are widespread – creating tons of obstacles to the productivity of their employees

— Nathan Marz (@nathanmarz) October 20, 2015

Enterprise agility. pic.twitter.com/bigRgzgSGe

— Alex Ley (@AlexEvade) October 14, 2015

React vs. Angular: A personal anecdote

I am currently working for a team that is about to build a web frontend for their in-house legacy system. The web frontend is basically a greenfield project, and the team can freely choose their technology stack.

I developed a small technology prototype in AngularJS and React. For both solutions I used npm and webpack as a build environement. In the AngularJS solution I used TypeScript and in the React solution I used ES2015 (formerly ES6) and Babel.

The prototype is here: https://bitbucket.org/jonasbandi/webshop/

I presented both solutions to the team, and let them decide which stack they like to choose for the actual project.

The team decided that they felt more comfortable with the solution based on React.

There were two main reasons:

• AngularJS is currently in a strange state, since Angular 2.0 is announced and hyped but not ready for production yet. If you start a project based on AngularJS now, you get the feeling that you are writing in a legacy technology right from the beginning.
• The React solution left a conciser impression and was clearer to grasp by the team. For example to realize a “component” in AngularJS you have to understand Directives (a DDO is pretty arcane for a newbie) and the implementation is spread over several entities (DDO, controller, template …). In contrast to that the approach of React to components is much easier to grasp.

This decision was made some weeks ago. In the meantime I set up the real project with the following components:

• A Build based on npm, webpack, Babel and ESLint (no gulp or grunt)
• React 0.14 / ReactRouter 1.0
• Flux architecture based on Alt.js
• Internationalization with i18next