I spent the weekend of the 11th–13th November at the University of Lincoln for DevXS. The event was sponsored by a variety of University of Lincoln organisations, DevCSI and Amazon Web Services and was apparently a resounding success.
I arrived via train and met up with fellow Aberystwyth students, most of whom are Artificial Intelligence and Robotics students. Being an Open Source Computing student, I was looking for a project with a slightly different focus and found it in Team York from the University of York.
Over 24 hours of constant development we developed the Tasks for Chrome project and submitted it for consideration in the Public Platforms competition, and the general DevCSI competition.
Tasks for Chrome
The final product consisted largely of a PHP API wrapper to the Google Tasks API, which allowed us to do some interesting things with PHP before we talked to Google Tasks. For the the Public Platforms competition, Andrew wrote a JSON parser for reading lists that several Universities provide online. Using this, it was a simple matter to build a web interface that allowed simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality while also making the import of reading lists trivial.
A Chrome extension was also developed as a proof of concept: it was possible to rapidly develop it with jQuery and AJAX into a toolbar button with a popup window. The popup window could also perform CRUD operations and import reading lists. There are a number of possibilities from here, such as subscribing to data sources instead of using manual import (think integration with bug trackers). Perhaps you could even sync between two or more users, sharing a todo list between a group.
The Experience
The experience of the entire conference was more important, however. The 26 teams produced some incredible software, with some of my personal favourites being Ook Nog and the Unofficial University Guide. The software developed in such a short space of time, by ~200 self-organising individuals, was inspirational.
The people were incredible; mostly Computer Science students with a smattering of other disciplines, everybody was easy-going, willing to help, and in an amazing mood. A particular mention goes to Dave Challis from University of Southampton for helping me with jQuery AJAX callbacks.
After recovering for a few days, DevXS has reinvigorated my software development passion. Yesterday saw me stepping through the the Git packfile format and the Glip source code, in order to understand exactly what is going on at the bit/byte level (with an explanatory blog post to follow…) which I’ve been putting off for weeks. PHP developers don’t have to deal with binary formats very often, but it really is so much simpler than it looks.
This post is partly to explain the absence of any updates for the last week, and to encourage anybody with free time in February to attend the Dev8D conference, which is bigger, better and free to attend—it really was a life-changing experience.
Dev8d may be free to entry, but you have to provide your own accommodation, though. Or you can apply to be part of the “crew”, as I did.
Good point, DevXS provided accomodation, while Dev8D does not. I can’t go, I’ll have far too much work to do for my Major Project in February, but I hope you enjoy it