Code Camp NYC

This weekend I had the opportunity to speak for the first time at the New York city Code Camp.  It was an excellent event with a huge turnout and an equivalently huge number of sessions.

With fourteen different sessions happening simultaneously, attendees were spoiled for choice and I am quite sure there were plenty of people having to make difficult choices.

Web Performance

I was happy to get the chance to see Nik Molnar’s talk on Full Web Stack Performance.  I got to learn about a number of handy HTTP related utilities that I had not seen before as well as get some great insight into how the web browsers are attempting to enable jank free user experiences.

There were a loads of other sessions that I would have loved to have seen, but unfortunately I was still preparing my own talks.

Hypermedia’s Secret Sauce

My first talk was a demonstration of how to build native client applications that use hypermedia to drive the application workflow.  The first demo was a slightly enhanced version of the sample that I show in my Hypermedia Client/Server Dance post.

The second demo was a more involved client application that had multiple screens and has an explicit ClientState class and specialized link classes to encapsulate the interaction behaviour of the client.  This client is very much a work in progress and will continue to evolve as I try and demonstrate more hypermedia capabilities.  You can find the source code for both the demos in my Github repository.  Be warned, if you are looking for something polished, you will be disappointed!

You can find the slides for the talk here on OneDrive.

Crafting Evolvable API Responses

My second talk was on designing representations for APIs that can evolve.  I spent some time explaining the disadvantages of using object serializers to build your wire representations and then went through a variety of different representation examples that attempt to address many of the common issues when doing API design.  The slides are available here, however the commentary on the representations is currently missing from the slides and we also did a number of examples based on questions from the audience.  If you happen to live near Burlington VT, I’ll be doing this talk again next Saturday at the Vermont Code Camp.

Kudos

I’d like to thank Steve Bohlen and Erik Stepp and the huge team of volunteers for putting on this event.  It is great to see so much participation in the developer community.