Biggest Hull Devs Meetup Yet

Joe whips the crowd into a frenzy....

Last Wednesday in the month. Time for another Hull Devs. This means free food and drink (including those lovely white chocolate buttons with hundreds and thousands on them) and high quality technical chat. And, the most people I've seen there ever. It was packed. I think there was one seat free. It was the one next to me, which might tell you something about my personal magnetism. But then again maybe not.

I'd taken along my shiny ipad pro and Apple pencil to take notes, and happily scribbled down summaries of the talks. And then, less happily, discovered that the ipad had lost the lot. I'm doing a kind of highly expensive experiment where I try to find out if an ipad can replicate a proper computer. Experience so far is that it can't, except in the function of trashing your work. 

Anyhoo, working from memory, we had two talks. The first was from Dylan Beattie. This was a great discussion on what makes for happy developers (and customers, and workmates). It was pleasing to find that a lot of the stuff I'd been telling students for years (make yourself a nice place to work, think about other people who might have to use your code) was echoed by Dylan, and he had some lovely insights into simple things that can make for happy times.

My favourite was the brilliantly simple "Give things names" suggestion. Rather than describing something as "The new version of the Customer Management App", name it after something, be it a particular "My Little Pony" or a east coast town. This provides an instant reference point for everyone. 

The second talk was from Seb Lambda. This was all about restful services, and how to make them better. It's not a field that I'm particularly familiar with (although I do know a lot more now). The improvements are all about getting clever about how a client fetches information from the server and preloads data. Seb talked about some really interesting ways in which this is being explored in the latest version of ReST 3.0.

If you're in Hull, and you're a developer (or a student becoming a developer) you should go to Hull Devs. The next one is in the new year. Find out more here.