Its Build time again and I just finished watching Mads Torgesens keynote on day 3, where he has been talking about Roslyn and new C# features that are comming. I am really getting excited about Roslyn, with demos comming out that show how to write tooling extentions. Its one of those things that have always seemed out of reach for most things in every day development, simply because it was too much work and pain to do. With Roslyn being open sourced yesterday (by Anders Hejlsberg live on stage), it will provide options never seen before. So it is really a good time to be a C# developer.

On top of that todays demo got into some language features that the team at Microsoft are putting into C# and VB. As Mads said these are all relatively small features, but small as they might be they solve some real pains with todays C#. More...

Since the amount of javascript in an average website has exploded, the need to unittest that code has become apparent. I think we are still a bit behind in this respect, as I often hear from people don’t know what “the right way” is to create such as setup. Sadly this seems to mean that they never got off the ground and skip testing clientside. Without starting any kind of war on this, I think most of us like at least some number of tests and the option to do TDD.

Well I may already have painted myself into a corner, as I don’t claim to know the one and only “right way”, but I have found a way of going about it that I really like and have fun with. Shortly put, I have been playing around with Mocha.js and Should.js – supported by the Chutzpah test-runner and testem that allows a light weight way of running tests while doing TDD.

Lately I have been working quite a bit with displaying data in realtime on the web. I was even lucky enough to get the chance to talk about it at the Warm Crocodile Developer Conference – showing off how this can be done from your favorite SPA frameworks AngularJS and EmberJS.

One of the things I really like about these kinds of solutions is that all of a sudden it has become easy to do something that hardly was possible just a short while ago. All thanks to websockets, and technologies that utilize it. Firebase is just one such tool, and in many cases you may want to go low-level and build your own backend with eg. SignalR. It is still not too much work, and probably the route to take for most larger applications. However when Firebase is sufficient, life cannot be much simpler for getting things done.

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True to form it is time to look back on another year that has passed way too quickly. Most of all it has been a year of change, where we  uprooted and moved across the country to Høje Taastrup, my girlfriend became my wife to be, we both started new jobs, and we began building our new house. So it has been action packed, a lot of fun, but also with a few bumps on the road.

IMHO an overlooked part of the otherwise thoroughly hyped Cloud technologies is the so called baskend-as-a-service or BaaS technologies. Most presentations revolve around scalability and hosting, which are of course central and important, but non the less not the entire cloud story. This is something I have been looking a bit into, because I feel there is so much value in the cloud that we are not picking up on just yet.

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The last day has no doubt been the most busy one for me. Not only were there a bunch of intersting talks, but I also had plans to do interviews with Douglas Crockford and Dan North. Two people I find extremely inspiring with Douglas having written THE book in Javascript and Dan one of my favorite speakers who always manages to teach me something in his talks all while having fun.

My day started out watching the keynote which was about becoming accomplished. Chad Fowler, who wrote the passionate programmer, did a good job at conveying ways to take charge of the great part of your life that is spent working. In his words a remarkable career equals a remarkable life with us spending about 50% of our life working.

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This was a talk I was looking forward to, because it was built on a story from the real world, around subjects that hit hime with me.

Graham Tackley gave us his story of how The Guardian has become one of the largest newspapers with 4-5 million users a day, by embracing the web, principles of open data and small engaged teams. At first skeptics feared publishing all of their articles online would undermine the business, but they have moved on to become one of the most dominating newspapers because of this decision.

Today everyone at the guardian has access to a dashboard with live data and a range of visualisations about traffic allowing them to make informed decisions about which articles to keep and which themes are trending. Visualisations include everything from a top 20 of what people have read in the last 3 minutes to graphs that can be broken down and filtered.

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So half way through day 2 of the GOTO conference I have spent all day so far hearing about security. Well with the small twist that I will shield you from todays keynote – which in my eyes should have been a regular talk as a historical view of java has very little interest to me.

I decided to follow the web security track and I am really happy I did. Aaron Bedra gave a really good talk about how to detect when your site is under attack and what you can do about it. He made it clear that you should always avoid bothering your users when building in security – something not all sites are too good at sadly. His analogy was a casino, where there is pleanty of security but you won’t know unless you have bad intentions.

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I picked Mike West’s talk because I felt certain it was a place where I could pick something up that I can use. Security on the web is difficult, and it is something that is still being worked on. Mike works at google, writes  a ton of articles on html5rocks and is working on some of the comming specs and proposals around security.

To put it short his advice is that you need SSL – otherwise any kind of security talk is mute. Even for sites that just display content, it is the only way that you can be sure the content is actually comming from the source that you think. Startssl.com is a great place to start, if you need a free cert, that uses the same level of cryptograhy as he enterprise certs that you can buy.

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First talk that I chose to go to was Dan North on why agile doesn’t scale – or how agile can cross the chasm as he corrected himself. His premis was that people put stuff around agile for it to scale, so it is not a property of agile that it scales. In his words it is like putting a car on a ferry, and claiming that the car floats.

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