MEETUPS and CONFERENCES

My First Meetup

In mid-April, Mark found several Meetup groups organized by and for women to learn various areas of web development.
I joined SF PyLadies and Women Who Code. Having installed Python 2.7, Powershell and Cygwin, I went on April 28 to PyLadies' first "Hack Night" at Klout in SF and sat at the "Newbie" Table with a dozen other women and continued to work through the exercises in Learn Python The Hard Way that I'd begun at home. The following week I'd finished exercise 21 .

Six months after this workshop, I happened upon Geek Chicks: PyLadies, a Gang of Female Computer Programmers, in LA Weekly, from Feb 2012. "It's not that the PyLadies are intimidated by the men who dominate computer programmer events and workshops. It's just that they got tired of feeling like outsiders." Katharine Jarmul and three other women started PyLadies LA in the summer of 2012.

Python/Django Workshop

On May 12, Mark and Shawna and I spent the whole Saturday at Huroku in SF at the PyLadie's Build your own Blog: Python/Django Workshop. We installed Django and followed the Django Project Tutorial.
Of the fifty-five of us, I was one of the very few using a PC, NOT a Mac. The configuration for Django on Windows was rather convoluted some of us fell behind early on, unable to follow along. I watched and took notes while Mark continued to work through the setup for Windows, which he later finished at home and wrote a how-to document which he posted on Google Docs.

A few weeks later I completed all that was done in the workshop. In July, after having already used Google App Engine to deploy my website, I read a bit on how to run Django on GAE and at some point will endeavor to do so and deploy my blog.

I also joined another Linkedin group: Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. See anitaborg.org

HTML5 Developers Conference

On May 21, for $65!, we went to the HTML5 Dev Conference in San Francisco I attended to several sessions, including:

• Select This! CSS Selectors by Estelle Weyl (Sr. Front End Engineer at Standardista)
• Practical HTML5: Using it Today (with Modernizr, polyfills and shims) by Dr. Doris Chen (Developer Evangelist at Microsoft)
• Responsive Web Design by Eddie Monge Jr (Front End Engineer at Lucid Design Group)

Most slides and videos from the conference are available at html5devconf slides

Confident Coding II - Javascript and JQuery

On June 16, we drove to Mountain View with Shawna and carpool add-on Diana, for the "Confident Coding II" workshop at Google

1. Estelle Weyl talked about Javascript: BasicJavascript
2. Doris Chen talked about jQuery: jQueryFundamentals

I won a paper copy of Eloquent Javascript , which I'd already begun to read online.

Mark gave me an electronic copy of another O'Reilly Javascript book, by Nicholas Zakas, Maintainable Javascript.

SFJS Meetup #26: Templates, Tests and Expert Coders

June 19 - Mark joined SFJS quite a while ago and goes to most of the meetups. The first I attended was this one (at Change.org) to hear about Browser Testing.

• Adam Christian on Browser Testing
  * a bit about the Javascript projects available for driving functional browser tests
  * how one can use headless modes and integrate with unit testing frameworks
  * his WD.js project is a full featured supporter of the JSON wire protocol, but there is work left to be done.
  * lessons learned about automated testing internally and working with the varied customer base at Sauce Labs
  
• Eric Elliott on Fluent JavaScript: Code Like a JavaScript Native
  
• Harald Rudell - Lightening Talk on Publishing Node God & Thoughts on Templating

HTML5 Education Day

On June 23 (for $25!) we went to Doris Chen's "HTML5 Education Day" at the Microsoft offices in SF. I haven't copied the "labs" yet, but do have her slides: HTML5 Education Day Presentations

All attendees were given a choice of a free O'Reilly Ebook

• I chose the Early Release of HTML5 Architecture: Building Apps for the Open Web
  
  
• Mark chose the Early Release of Eric Elliot's Programming JavaScript Applications: Robust Web Architecture With Node, HTML5, and Modern JS Libraries

Open Web Camp IV

July 14 was Open Web Camp IV at PayPal in Mountain View. In the morning, I went to:

• HTML5: All about Web Forms by Estelle Weyl (Presentation Slides)
  A talk at the same time HTML5 and Microformats 2 - the next evolutionary step for web data is worth a look at his
  Presentation Slides.
• Building Offline Web Applications with ApplicationCache by Peter Lubbers (Presentation Slides). See his ApplicationCache demo and also his github account.
• Realizing 'One Web' by Kimberly Blessing - (Presentation Slides)

.. and after lunch:

• Getting Your CSS Under Control by Jonathen Snook (Presentation Slides), (author of Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS)
• Leaving Flatland: Getting Started with WebGL was quite interesting.
  I did not go to this one: Graphics and Animation Effects with CSS3 3D, jQuery, and WebGL, but can see his Presentation Slides
• Making your web dev life easier using SASS, Compass and the new tools around them by Dirk Ginader (Presentation Slides)
  For me, this was the most useful talk of the day: learning about the CSS Preprocessor Sass and the CSS Authoring Framework Compass. Mark later installed them both for me, along with the requisite Ruby and Rails.
  (Mark also mentioned Zurb's Foundation 3, "The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world". We'll see.)

  I did NOT go to Turning the Web up to 11 because the speaker, Chris Wilson, gave the same presentation on the Web Audio API standard at Google I/O just a few weeks earlier.

Building a Performant HTML5 App

Thurs, July 19, we went to a meetup at Linkedin in Mountain View of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Web Performance Group . "Trunal Bhanse and Akhilesh Gupta of the LinkedIn Mobile team as they talk about techniques that ensured a snappy experience on the recently released LinkedIn iPad app. Some of the topics for the evening include local storage as a persistence strategy, and infinite scrolling in html5 on mobile, gotchas to watch out for while developing HTML5, transitions for HTML5, memory leaks, and dealing with large number of images in the DOM." The video was later posted on YouTube's Linkedin Tech Talks (YouTube)
The book of the evening was Web Performance Daybook Volume 2 Techniques and Tips for Optimizing Web Site Performance

* * ALSO THAT NIGHT, which I maybe should've gone to instead, was the
SF Selenium Meetup Group's Proxies, HAR Files, JS Executors, Flex/Flash! by Adam Goucher, one of the editors of
Beautiful Tesing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software , a sample of which I read last year. The presentation slides for this talk are on the website.

Workshop: Improve the Django Tutorial

On Aug 4, Mark and I spent Saturday at Votizen in SF with PyLadies at the SF Django Meetup Group's twice-monthly meeting
because the topic that day was Django Sprint: Let's Improve the Django Tutorial! workshop.
I asked about the integration with Google App Engine and was told, not unexpectly, to abandon the effort and switch to Heroku as my web hosting service.

Hack Night

On Aug 17, Mark and I spent Saturday afternoon at Twilio in SF for a PyLadies Hack Night. I revisted and continued my efforts with Python The Hard Way,

..and also learned of a few things...

• NetworkX, a Python language software package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks.
• D3JS (D3 for Data-Driven Documents), a visualization framework for internet browsers running javascript, a a JavaScript library "for manipulating documents based on data.

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• CompScisters a (Facebook) group for women taking free online courses (Massive Open Online Course, or MOOCs) offered by Udacity, Coursera, and EdX within the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Departments.
• woman2.0, Female founders and women entrepreneurs. venture-lab.org

Film: "Miss Represenation"

Aug 15th, at Engine Yard in SF, a group called "STEM Women's Wednesday" (a social/drink up group) hosted a 7pm screening of Miss Representation, a Sundance Film that "exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America."

I didn't get to Engine Yard, but I was able to watch the DVD from Netflix.
For reviews, see: Schema Magazine, Mother Jones, Hollywood Reporter and The F Word

Lightning Talks

On Aug 21, I finally went to a Women Who Code event: Lightning Talks, at Parisoma in SF.
Topics included IFTTT, Mobile, Accessiblity, Javascript frameworks, collecting performance metrics, Redis Open Source, augmented reality, finding your voice, anitaborg.org and systers.org, sf.citi();.
Most helpful for me were:

• IFTTT (If This Then That): Beating IFTTT with a Python script & a cron job
  
  
• Technical Interviewing - She recommended Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job (Programmer to Programmer), 3rd Edition, 2011, by John Mongan, Noah Kindler, Eric Gigere
  -- Mark has had the 2nd (2007) edition of this book for several years and agreed that it is quite good.
  (It another Wrox book with a black-and-white photo of the author(s) - guys - on the cover). I see that the new edition has a different photo,
  one man in a cape on a cliff - reminiscent of a German Romantic painting.)
  I was surprised to hear that even for a position as front end developer, she was asked algorithm and 'brain teaser' questions.
  For beginners, she recommended reading Thinking Physics.
  
  
• Cool Git Tricks - Git has several very useful features that are not enabled by default.
  
  
• Developing Your Voice, by a young woman who, after two years at Google, had a "Quarter Life Crisis". She read "every available book" on the subject of men and women communicating, and has concluded that developing one's "voice" and learning to project it, is the most important.
  Lesson 1: Just because someone is speaking doesn't mean he knows it,
  Lesson 2: Be aware that I also know something
  She suggested:
  * reply to group emails: the more you are seen in an email thread, the more people kmnow aobut you
  * use your voice, even if unsure
  * in meetings, sit AT the table (not in the chairs on the periphery)
  * AND, sit next to your boss
  * learn to say no: an important skill to have

NOTE:
The first Lightning Talks by Women Who Code (founded in Sept 2011) was in Nov 2011 and written up in Forbes by Angie Chang

Cracking the Coding Interview: Technical Interview Practice

On Aug 22, I went to another Women Who Code event for Technical Interview Practice, at Dev Bootcamp in SF.

The speaker was Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the author of Cracking the Coding Interview; the object was
"to flesh out technical interviewing skills, seek advice, and practice for coding on those big scary whiteboards",
but it ended up being a long and immensely helpful talk by Gayle.
Mark has her The Google Resume; I bought the new 5th edition of the interview book. The book includes 150 interview quesitons, with answers; her website includes over 8000, without answers.
Lynn posted a list of her own questions on google docs. Another source for interview questions is glassdoor.com

CANCELLED (2nd time)

jQuery Live! - Unit Testing

Tues, Aug 28, SF East Bay jQuery, at Techliminal in Oakland, jQuery Live! - Unit Testing JavaScript unit testing covering Qunit and other testing frameworks.

DID NOT ATTEND

A/B Testing: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?

Wed, Aug 29, Optimizely Meetups-A/B Testing and Beyond at Spur in SF A/B Testing: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?
See What is A/B Testing on optimizely.com. See also The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That's Changing the Rules of Business in Wired, April 2012. See The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing in Smashing Magazeine, 2010

DID NOT ATTEND (in Palo Alto)

Mini Djangocon

I did not attend, but here are the slides from some of the Lightning Talks:

• Django Admin - Widgetry and Witchery by Pamela Fox
• Django vs. Flask by Rachel Sanders
• User-testing your Django app before launch - Tracy Osborn

The main talk, which she'll give at 2012 DjangoCon in DC, was Between where the Tutorials End & the Wild West Begins: bringing new devs up to speed on Django

DID NOT ATTEND

IndexedDB

On Aug 30, Mark went to Yelp in SF for this talk on IndexedDB. I didn't go because the subject is not something I need to know more about just now. He said that both the beer and the pizza were particulary good and the presentation informative .. and he had several productive converstaions.
IndexedDB is an API for client-side storage of significant amounts of structured data and for high performance searches on this data using indexes. While Web Storage (Local and Session Storage) is useful for storing smaller amounts of data, it is less useful for storing larger amounts of structured data. IndexedDB provides a solution.
I'm including it here not just as a part of the list-of-things-to-keep-in-mind, but because Mark was astonished when he looked around and realized that

OF THE 150*ish PARTICIPANTS, ONLY TWO, TWO WERE WOMEN:

Vanessa, one of the event's organizers, and Estelle Weyl (who does the "Confident Coding" series).
We spent the rest of the evening engaged in our on-going discussion of why ... especially in this case: the percentage of this group's members is far higher than a few percent.

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* 300 signed up but a large number were no-shows

Sat, Sept 22, PyLadies Learn Python the Hard Way - Peninsula Edition at Wize Commerce in Mountain View

I talked with a woman who works at Wize as a tester. They use Selenium and are currently transitioning to Agile.

Wed, Oct 3, PyLadies' Mini-PyCon at Yelp in SF

"Can't wait for PyCon, the international mecca for Python developers, users, and everyone in between? Want to give a talk yourself? Curious about what other Pythonistas are doing with Python?"

This is also the first week of both EdX-Harvard David Malan's CS50 and coursera's Intro to Interactive Python

HTML5 Developers Conference

Mon-Tues, Oct 15-16, the 2012 HTML5 Dev Conf in SF ($65),this time the Palace Hotel.

• "Cache Is King" Keynote: Steve Souders - Google
• "HTML5: Postcards from the Bleeding Edge" Peter Lubbers - Google
  The slides are here
• "Using Open-Source Tools and Libraries to Build Living, Breathing Systems in Your Browser" Julie Ann Horvath - GitHub ..
• "Tactical HTML and CSS", Shay Howe - Groupon
• "#{$N} Things You Didn't Know Sass and Compass Could Do" Chris Eppstein - Caring.com
• "The Future is Responsive" -- Matt Kelly - ZURB and HotChalk

Tues, Oct 16, PyLadies' @ Coursera: Interactive Programming with Python, at Twitter in SF, while another group meets at Coursera itself in Mtn View. at Coursera in Mountain View.A POSSIBLE SF GATHERING - a space needed "will meet each Tues for 8 weeks, starting October 16th through December 4th, while the course is ongoing to watch videos, discuss what we learnt, work on the quizzes, and brainstorm the assignments with the help of Coursera staff."

Confident Coding III - All You Need to Know

Sat, Oct 20, all day Confident Coding III: All You Need to Know ( $50 ), at Microsoft in SF.
"This third full day conference will differ from previous Confident Coding workshops. The first two CC sessions were about JavaScript. This third will be about everything outside of programming and markup languages. Topics are not finalized, but may include Git, permissions, .htaccess, Response headers, DNS, FTP / SSH, Bash / command line, SSL, domains and subdomains and protocols, debugging, etc." See confidentcoding.com

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I won the drawing for the $299 ticket to that following Friday's Javascript Everywhere in San Jose.

Git Workshop by GitHub

Sun Oct 21, 12-4pm CodeChix $10, GIT Workshop by GitHub - Part 1, in Menlo Park
GitHub Developers Julie Ann Hovarth and Paul Betts teach Git fundamentals: Julie Ann Horvath is a Designer and Front-ender at GitHub.
Paul Betts is a native code hacker for GitHub
Getting Started First Time Git Setup
We worked through the Try Git tutorial and I learned about using "markdown". and Git Documentation Salesforce Git Cheatsheet NDPSoftware's Git Cheatsheet

DID NOT ATTEND -

• Tues, Oct 23, PyLadies' @ Coursera: Interactive Programming with Python, in SF
• Wed, Oct 24 and Oct 31 Weekly 6:30, Women's Javascript Study Group, at Zoosk, SF
• DID NOT ATTEND Sat Oct 27th, 9am-8pm at Microsoft, Mtn View. Windows 8 DevCamp for JavaScript and HTML5 Developers, with Doris Chen.

Javascript Everywhere Conference

Fri Oct 26th, 8:30 all day at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose Javascript Everywhere 2012 conference

• "You Don't Need a Framework for That" - Estelle Weyl, Standardista Creating a third party widget? Optimizing a mobile Web site? Frameworks may be a bad idea. Targeting a DOM node? Determining a CSS class? Storing and retrieving custom values on nodes in the DOM tree? No need to include a library. Dataset, classlist and query selector can do it all for us. We'll cover when frameworks are a good idea, when they are unnecessary (or even a bad idea). and well supported technologies that you may have missed. You may not need to include a framework after all. In this session we will also cover the HTML5 dataset and Selectors APIs
  
  
• "Accessible Design with HTML5", Raj Lal, W3C/Nokia
  How to design an HTML5 website which supports people with disabilities, and know why its a good business decision.
  The four major disabilities which will be covered, that effect user capabilities are visual, hearing, mobility (difficulty in using the mouse), and cognitive disabilities, which are related to learning abilities. Know how to use the latest technologies to accommodate these users in the user interface. An accessible web application gives maximum reach to your application's information, functionalities and benefits, by allowing multiple input methods, different interaction models, and customization based on special needs and limited device supports. - Understand the problem around designing interfaces for people with, disabilities - Know concrete steps to design and develop web applications to, accommodate the four kinds of major disabilities in HTML5 - Know the business case for Accessibility, 4; Learn the standard practices and design guidelines for accessible, design in HTML5
  
  
• "Browser Versions Are Dead", Kyle Simpson
  The browser version is a dead concept. You must stop caring about the browser version, its update cycle, and even (to some extent), its intrinsic capabilities. Every single person who has ever worked in Web development has, more or less, been fed a lie. It's a lie that is so insidious that it is actually mutated the way our Web development industry works from the inside out. It has made us worse as an industry and cost untold billions of dollars in lost time. What is that lie? "The browser version matters, because that's how we know what it can and cannot do." Or, put another way, "The browser version matters, because we have to know how to hack it so that it looks the same as every other browser." The browser version is dead. Hacking around browser short-falls is dead. Compensating for non-compliance to standards is dead. UA sniffing is dead. Quit wasting your time! Let's start retraining decision makers (customers, bosses, etc.) about how the Web and browsers really work.
  
  
• "From Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery", Morten Nielsen, RemoteX
  Follow along as we go through how we at RemoteX changed from running a nightly build with manual deployment to production, to a completely automated continuous delivery pipeline. Hear the lessons we have learned along the way, and hear about some of the benefits we have seen from automating our delivery model and get some ideas as to how it might be accomplished.
  
  
• "You Want to Do WHAT with JavaScript?!", Sebastian Golasch, Denkwerk
  Born in the mid 90's as the stepdaughter of Java applets in Netscape Navigator, JavaScript has come a long way. Once used to validate forms and to dynamically change the background color of web pages, JavaScript is now the number one citizen in the interwebs. Why? Because you can do all kinds of crazy and fascinating stuff with it! In this talk, Sebastian will show what is possible today: Video chats, controlling Arduino based robots, playing with Microsoft's Kinect in the browser, wiring it all together and more. Just be surprised and follow Sebastian and JavaScript where no other programming language has gone before!
  
  
• "JS in the front; REST in the back", Pamela Fox, Coursera
  In traditional Web apps, we put as much of our app into the server-side as we could - our data, our templates, our logic. But nowadays, it makes more sense to put as much of our app into the client-side as possible, using libraries like BackboneJS to architect it. Based on my experience in rewriting Coursera admin from a traditional app to a client-centric app, I'll try and convince you why you should reverse your stack and show you how we did it, using JavaScript libraries like BackboneJS and RESTful APIs.
  
  
• "Test your JavaScript, Break the build, Be a hero!", Trevor Lalish-Menagh, Comcast
  Martin Flower states that the definition of legacy code is code without tests. You test your server-side code, but if you are working on a site with a fair amount of non-trivial JavaScript (Ajax calls, extensive callbacks, etc.) you really should be testing your JavaScript as well. All the untested JavaScript code we are writing today is, in effect, legacy code, but we can address this with JavaScript unit testing! One of the biggest problems with testing JavaScript is the need for a browser to do it. This makes it hard to integrate your test suite into CI servers, like Jenkins and Anthill Pro. Trevor will show you how to get around this with EnvJasmine to allow you to test your front-end code and get it passing within any CI server that understands how to run Maven, Ant, or Rake jobs.
  
  
• "Unit Testing Your Javascript with QUnit and Sinon", JS Nicholas Silva, Box
  Unit testing is a core part of a developer's job, and is an important part of software quality. All too often though, JavaScript is left out of the unit testing mix. In just a few months, Box went from no JavaScript tests to over 500, and now it is an integral part of our development process. In this talk you will learn how to quickly create tests for your JavaScript code using QUnit as the test framework and Sinon.JS to create mocks, spies, and stubs.
• "Using JavaScript Everywhere", Jigar Desai, eBay

Intro to Designing User Experiences

Sat, Nov 3, 9am-3pm, Girl Develop It Intro to Designing User Experiences ($40) at Twillio in SF.

Taught by Gwen Brinsmead (a UI/UX designer at Appcelerator) and Sheba Najmi (a Code for America Fellow and former UX Designer at Yahoo!), this will be a highly interactive and collaborative workshop covering User Experience design. UX Design is prominent in the creation of any product including websites and mobile applications.
We will introduce you to the principles and process of UX Design. This workshop will include brainstorming sessions, group projects, and design prototyping. We will start at 9, have lunch at 12:15, then wrap up by 3. There are no prerequisites for this workshop and a computer is not necessary, however you may find it useful. Come with an open mind and we'll teach you what you need to know to get started with design!

Gwen's "7D Challengs" Bo a Digital Journalist

Automated Testing Workshop

Wed, Nov 7, 6:30-9:30m Girl Develop It Automated Testing Workshop ($20), at Sauce Labs in SF.

This workshop will introduce you to automated functional testing with Selenium and For those not familiar, Selenium is a framework that drives browsers from a user perspective and is incredibly handy for UI testing and automating tasks, such as whether a login function or payment button works. Testing is a key part of the development and release process, so we'll dive into why you should test,
how to get started with Selenium, and
what tools are out there for writing functional tests.
Then we'll write and run some sample tests for a demo app and run those in various browsers locally and in the Sauce cloud.
Finally, we'll help you write tests for your existing web app in whatever language you're using.
This workshop will be led by Sebastian Tiedtke, Senior Web Dev at Sauce Labs, and Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, Sauce Ninja and Selenium Committer.

App Engine Bootcamp at Google SF

Tues Dec 4, GDGSF (Google Developer Group SF)

..taught in Python, not Java

You'll need administrative rights to your laptop in order to install the SDK, language runtime and IDE. This code lab is intended for developers who regularly write code but are new to Google App Engine.