Last Tuesday Mossy and I went to AngularJS Dublin meetup - "Meetup #2 - Aer Lingus case study, Ionic and Comtrade's Protractor experience" which was held at Google HQ - a couple of very informative and insightful talks there.
The first one, and my personal favorite of the evening was by Jason Marah mostly about optimizations of resources such as templates, images and i18n. One of the nice things he mentioned was ReSRC.it which delivers properly sized images according to current page width (works as a CDN) - go check it out.
The second talk was by Aleksandar Ristic and it was about Protractor which is an end-to-end testing framework for Angular web apps (it can be used for testing non-Angular apps as well). It's a NodeJS program built on top of WebDriverJS and Aleksandar showed us some basic workflows of working with it and a couple of neat tricks to get everyone started with Protractor.
The third, and last talk of the evening was by Mohammed Malaka on Ionic - an open-source front-end SDK for developing hybrid mobile apps with HTML5. What Ionic is, is essentially front-end building blocks (Ionic) on top of Angular on top of Cordova. According to Mohammed, it's nice to work with, gives you lots of features to build your apps fast, works nice and is apparently pretty performant for a hybrid approach.
Just a day after that there was another meetup - Ruby Ireland "Slash & Burn the Backend", focused on DB workload and ORM's. I thought ideas from this meetup could be very interesting and applicable to .net world as well so I went there. Both talks were held buy guys from Intercom.
The first talk - “Slash Your Query Times” was by Ciaran Lee. He talked about how they profiled their DB queries which helped them in figuring out the bottlenecks of their system. They even created a neat DB query fingerprinting tool for Ruby which they said they would open-source. Nice one!
The second talk - “ActiveRecord: It Burns!” was by Brian White and it was about a couple of bad design patterns and problems one can run into with ActiveRecord. The whole talk had kind of a philosophical approach.
Anyway, I really enjoyed all of them and I’m really looking forward to the next one that will be held in a few weeks - “Famo.us, JS Game Development and Building Responsive sites with AngularJS” . Sounds like a whole lot of interesting topics!