GOTO – the end

I am now on my way home from the last day at GOTO and it has been another day with lots and lots of input. I chose to spend the afternoon watching two talks from the HTML5 track, followed by one on the humans at work and then lastly seeing the closing keynote.

The two talks on the HTML5 track were by Scott Hanselman who talked about mobile development and Dan North who declared “The browser is dead… long live the browser”.

The red line through Scotts talk was that there are different paths to take in order to provide a better experience for the rapidly growing number of users who are using a mobile device. With some countries actually being pretty much exclusively mobile users it is very important to think about this. As it is said, not making a decision is also making a decision, but you are really hurting a large percentage of your users if you choose to ignore the mobile world.

Dan Norths talk revolved around 4 key points. Everything is asynchronous, the DOM is the template, the server serves data and someone has already solved it. Building on these points Dan demonstrated a simple architecture using NodeJS to serve data and everything else done in the browser using some of the popular frontend frameworks like jQuery, Knockout and Twitter Bootstrap. Once again Dan really caught the audience, got some good laughs on the way, while getting his points across.

Liz Keogh’s talk on the humans at work track was entitled “To be honest”. Her talk consisted of a range of stories from real live, about how different kinds of lying gets us into trouble when building software and coming up with solutions. Estimates, scrum, the agile manifesto, bug counting and talking about something as being done are all lies. So in order to progress we need to get better at communicating and being honest. She pointed out that “you should not let your process hide your ignorance”. Processes tend to force us to do things in fixed formats, which in turn make up subtle lies and cloud honest and clear communication.

Finally it came time for the keynote, where Anders Hejlsberg went over which problems they aim to solve with TypeScript, while covering some of the design choices it has been based on. Naturally part of the talk was overlapping with what I had seen the day before, but I am glad that I stayed the the talk because he did have some deeper samples and just overall gave a great talk.