May – 2010 – techPortal

Code and Release Management May 25, 2010

Speaker: Eli White

Programmers seem to have a fairly good grasp on 'how to write code', but not always what to do with it once it's been written. This talk with delve into details about how to manage your codebase, and how to manage releases (often intertwined). It will cover topics of coding standards and focus heavily on how you choose to use versioning tools to handle your development and release processes. It will have a distinct Subversion(SVN) flavor to the talk, but the concepts will not be specific to SVN.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (122.4MB)
The Elephpant Challenge - Winners and Results May 17, 2010

We recently wrapped up the Ibuildings Elephpant Challenge, a contest where a PHP Elephpant traveled around the world visiting a given set of landmarks. Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

In this post, the winners will be announced and we will make some observations based on the contest.

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State & Ajax - How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World May 11, 2010

Speaker: Paul Reinheimer
This talk will examine the two greatest problems in Ajax development (except for that pesky browser issue): Exactly what that “Asynchronous” word means, what problems it creates, and how they can be effectively managed, next the YUI Browser History object will be examined, finally handing control of Ajax applications back to the user via their familiar back button.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (40.8MB)