Month: January 2013

The big list of developer conferences in 2013

Looking for good software & technology conferences in 2013? I did a bit of scrounging around, talked with some colleagues, and came up with this big list of 2013 dev conferences, ordered by date.

  • W3Conf
    February 21-22
    San Francisco, California
    The W3C’s annual conference for web professionals. Latest news on HTML5, CSS, and the open web platform.
  • Web Summit
    March 1st
    London, Great Britain
    "Our events focus on giving attendees an incredible experience with a mix of world-leading speakers, buzzing exhibitions and effective, deal-making networking opportunities. Our illustrious list of past speakers includes the founders of Twitter, YouTube, Skype and over 200 international entrepreneurs, investors and influencers."
  • MX 2013
    March 3-4
    San Francisco, California
    UX and UI conference. “Managing Experience is a conference for leaders guiding better user experiences”
  • SXSW Interactive
    March 8-12
    Austin, Texas
    "The 2013 SXSW® Interactive Festival will feature five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders, the SXSW Trade Show and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer. Join us for the most energetic, inspiring and creative event of the year."
  • Microsoft VSLive Vegas
    March 25-29
    Las Vegas, Nevada
    .NET developer conference. “Celebrating 20 years of education and training for the developer community, Visual Studio Live! is back in Vegas, March 25-29, to offer five days of sessions, workshops and networking events – all designed to make you a more valuable part of your company’s development team.”
  • anglebrackets
    April 8-11
    Las Vegas, Nevada
    anglebrackets is a conference for lovers of the web. We believe that the web is best when it’s open and collaborative. We believe in the power of JavaScript and expressiveness of CSS the lightness of HTML. We love interoperability and believe that the best solution is often a hybrid solution that brings together multiple trusted solutions in a clean and clear way. We love the expressiveness of language, both spoken and coded. We believe that sometimes the most fun at a conference happens in the whitespace between conference sessions. More details at     Hanselman’s blog.
  • Dev Intersection, SQL Intersection
    April 8-11
    MGM Grand, Las Vegas, Nevada
    Visual Studio, ASP.NET, HTML5, Mobile, Windows Azure, SQL Server conference. Focused on .NET and SQL developers.
  • TechCruch Disrupt
    April 27th-May 1st
    New York City, New York
    Technology and startups conference.
  • Microsoft VSLive Chicago
    May 13-16
    Chicago, Illinois
    .NET developer conference
  • Google I/O
    May 15-17
    Registration opens March 13th at 7am.
    San Francisco, California
    Probably the most anticipated developer conference in the world. Expecting some news on Google Glass, perhaps some haptics support in Droid devices, maybe a bit on self-driving cars…what’s not to love?Registration to be opened up early February. Tickets usually sell out immediately.
  • GlueCon
    May 22nd-23rd
    Denver Colorado
    "Cloud, Mobile, APIs, Big Data — all of the converging, important trends in technology today share one thing in common: developers. Developers are the vanguard. Developers are building in the cloud, building mobile applications, utilizing and building APIs, and working with big data. At the end of the day, developers are the core."
  • Microsoft TechEd
    June 3-6
    New Orleans, Louisiana
    Longstanding Microsoft developer and technology conference.
  • Mobile Conference
    June 6-7
    Amsterdam, The Netherlands
    Conference for mobile devs, focusing on the future of mobile app development.
  • WWDC
    June 10-14
    Apple’s highly-anticipated Worldwide Developer Conference. Tickets go on sale April 25th.
  • Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC)
    June 12-14
    Oslo, Norway
    Huge developer conference featuring some of the biggest speakers in software, including Jon Skeet, Scott Meyers, Don Syme, Scott Allen, and Scott Guthrie.
  • Microsoft BUILD
    June 26-28
    San Francisco, California
    Microsoft’s one big Windows developer event. All the big Microsoft names –from Guthrie, to Hejlsberg, to Hanselman — will be there. Expect great technical presentations, tablet giveaways, and an all-hands-on-deck Microsoft powerhouse conference.
  • SIGGRAPH 2013
    July 21-25
    Anaheim, California
    40th international conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques. Graphics, mobile, art, animation, simulations, gaming, science.
  • OSCON
    July 22-26
    Portland, Oregon
    Biggest open source technology conference.
  • ThatConference
    August 12-14th, 2013
    Kalahari Resort, Wisconsin Dells, WI
    Spend 3 days, with 1000 of your fellow campers in 150 sessions geeking out on everything Mobile, Web and Cloud at a giant waterpark.
  • <anglebrackets>
    October 27th – 30th
    MGM Grand, Las Vegas, Nevada
    Hosted by renowned developer and speaker Scott Hanselman, <anglebrackets> is a conference for lovers of the web. We believe that the web is best when it’s open and collaborative. We believe in the power of JavaScript and expressiveness of CSS the lightness of HTML. We love interoperability and believe that the best solution is often a hybrid solution that brings together multiple trusted solutions in a clean and clear way. We love the expressiveness of language, both spoken and coded. We believe that sometimes the most fun at a conference happens in the whitespace between conference sessions.

    Author’s note: I attended the spring <anglebrackets> in April, and it was positively fantastic. Highly recommend this conference.

  • DevConnections and WinConnections
    Week of November 18
    Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada
    Microsoft developer event

If you’re into futurism and technology evolution, The Singularity Summit might be for you, with speakers like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Norvig. The dates for 2013 are yet unannounced.

As for me, I’m headed to anglebrackets/DevIntersection in April. This dual conference will host speakers like Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Damian Edwards, Elijah Manor, Christian Heilmann. Should be a blast!

Know any good conferences not listed here? Let me know in the comments.

Stop writing for loops in Javascript

You have an array; you want to find an element in the array. What do you do?

Most developers go with the old procedural for loop:

var items = [
   { Name = "Matthew", Id = 1 },
   { Name = "Mark", Id = 2 },
   { Name = "Luke", Id = 3 },
   { Name = "John", Id = 4 }
];

// Find the item with Id === 3
var matchingItem = null;
for (i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
     if (items.Id === 3) {
       matchingItem = item;
       break;
     }
}

  // Do something with matchingItem
}

What’s wrong with this?

It’s the classic procedural programming affliction: over-specification. It painfully specifies all the steps the program must take to reach the desired state.

All you want is the item with an Id of 3, but instead you create a new loop variable, increment that variable each loop, use special loop iteration language syntax, index into the array, check if it matches your condition, store the match in a mutable variable.

The how obscures the what.

Thank you sir, may I have another.

This obfuscates the intent of your code via over-specificying pageantry.

It’s also error prone. The above code omitted the var declaration for the loop variable i, (did you catch that?), thus adding it to the global scope (oops!). Developers often forget to break; out of the for loop when a match is found, resulting in superfluous loop iterations at best, unintended behavior at worst.

Can we do better?

How about .filter?

Today’s JavaScript (1.5+) includes the built-in .filter function:

var items = [
     { Name = "Matthew", Id = 1 },
     { Name = "Mark", Id = 2 },
     { Name = "Luke", Id = 3 },
     { Name = "John", Id = 4 }
  ];

  // Find the item with Id === 3
  var matchingItem = items.filter(function(item) {
     return item.Id === 3;
})[0];

  // Do something with matchingItem...

.filter is a higher-order function that returns all elements in the array that match your predicate. The above code calls .filter(…) and then gets the first matching item.

This is better, but still not right.

What’s wrong with this? Like a for loop that forgot to break; out of the loop after finding a match, .filter will iterate over your entire array, even if it already found a match. This will result in superfluous iterations. And if your code doesn’t account for multiple items matching your condition, you’ll get unexpected behavior.

Solution

There’s no way to do this efficiently or succinctly using any of the built-in JavaScript array functions.

Because of this, most developers just do the ugly one, or the inefficient one.

A proper solution would be a function added to the Array prototype chain. In lieu of the browser vendors doing that, we can do it like this:

if (!Array.prototype.first)
{
   Array.prototype.first = function(predicate)
   {
     "use strict";   
     if (this == null)
       throw new TypeError();      
     if (typeof predicate != "function")
       throw new TypeError(); 
     
     for (var i = 0; i < this.length; i++) {
       if (predicate(this[i])) {
         return match;
       }
     }      
     return null;
   }
}

Here, we’ve defined a .first method on the Array prototype. It uses the efficient-but-ugly for loop. But instead of coding up this for loop every time, we can now just call our higher-order function:

var items = [
   { Name = "Matthew", Id = 1 },
   { Name = "Mark", Id = 2 },
   { Name = "Luke", Id = 3 },
   { Name = "John", Id = 4 }
];

// Find the item with Id === 3
var matching = items.first(function(i) { return i.Id === 3 });

// Do something with match...

Much cleaner, syntactically similar to .filter, but without the superfluous iterations.

JavaScript has no lambda syntax (yet), so it’s not as clear as it could be. Ideally, we’d write it more succinct, something like:

var matchingItem = items.first(item => item.Id === 3);

We’ll have to wait for the proposed arrow function syntax for the next version of JavaScript before we can get that succinct.

In the meantime, Array.prototype.first is a nice polyfill with decent syntax, allowing your code to focus on what, rather than how.