Having a relationship with Megan Fox
So what is it like to have a relationship with Megan Fox? If this got your attention and you want to know more, then read on and let me take you back to the 2 days in Hamburg, where this and many more interesting topics were covered at the Web Developer Conference. I was happy to be invited to the conference to give one of the 26 talks. I arrived on Sunday afternoon and amazed by the nice location, I had to make my way to the speakers meeting. So I hurried to the private brewery where the orga team welcomed us with drinks and a grilled pig. Yes, a whole pig.
On the first conference day the sessions started out with the keynote by Fabien Potencier, who introduced us to symphony. The framework creator also told the story how he got inspired by dependency injection and took parts of it to PHP. He was preaching to drink less beer and read more books instead, because that is where he finds all his ideas and knowledge.
I have to say that I cannot completely agree with that. Meeting with interesting people like on this conference and being able to talk to them is just as inspiring to me and opens my mind for new projects and solutions. But granted: You don't need beer for that.
Still stuffed with the suckling that we had the evening before, I made my way to the lunch buffet. It looked and tasted very good so that I had to stuff myself even more.
The first talk that got me really excited was held by Sasha Wolter, who let a robot move around and even call his phone to tell him "ouch!", when it collided with an object. Sasha talked about the countless intelligent machines that are finding their way into our lives and presented us with new possibilities on how to interact with them. I was very happy to hear such an interesting talk after the lunch break!
Ido Flatow, a nice guy from Israel I had the chance to talk to on the day before, continued with a talk about how to use Fiddler to debug websites and client applications that are communicating via HTTP. I already used Fiddler in my daily work but I learned a lot of new ways and features.
Next up was my presentation about the integration of enterprise search solutions in intranets and websites. I mainly focused on Apache Lucene and the Solr project that is based on it. You can find a simple example how to interact with Solr and PHP on my Github.
Bastian Hofmann finished the first day with an awesome session about scale able web applications. Being part of the ResearchGate development team, he included code samples and explained how web applications can easily be divided into modules that are loaded separately and still perform great and how to write code that will run on the client and on the server using meteor.js.
I'm sure you are still waiting for the story about the relationship with Megan Fox. I will not keep you waiting much longer... I promise!
Waking up after a great night out with lots of awesome discussions, I had some breakfast and proceeded to the conference room where we were greeted into the new day again by Bastian Hofmann. This time he talked about next level JavaScript and showed us how to use embedly to embed OEmbed content into our JavaScript applications.
Another topic that always seemed interesting to me but I never had time to try out was covered by David Z?lke. Big Data is his specialty and the yellow elephant named Hadoop his tool of choice. It is a very powerful tool that converts a lot of cheap hardware into one powerful super computer that can be used to solve computing problems with a large amount of data using map/reduce. David even showed a demo where he analyzed a huge log file.
Finally the time has come to talk about Megan Fox. When Golo Roden introduced his best practices of JavaScript, he first explained why JavaScript has such a bad reputation. Since JavaScript has been greatly influenced by LISP but still got some C-like looks, many people try to use it like C and stumble upon unexpected behavior. "It is as if you just came out of a long lasting relationship where both partners became bored of each other and suddenly you meet this Megan Fox (Women are welcome to imagine a similar male figure) like Girl and you treat her the same way. It simply can't work!" He furthermore talked about some very nice features of JavaScirpt and the pitfalls that come with it. Learn your language, write good code and use JSLint!
In my opinion JavaScript is an awesome language and that's why I'm glad to write code for the worlds best WYSIWYG HTML editor!
Unfortunately this was the last talk for me because I had to catch my flight back to Vienna.
Thanks for the great conference and the nice discussions. I hope to see you all again soon!