Thursday, July 25, 2013

PhoneGap Day US 2013 Recap

Why, weren't you there? Seriously, what's stopped you? This conference is so great and so cheap that if you are anywhere near Portland, Oregon you need to go. Even if you aren't near Portland you need to convince your boss to send you to the conference.

What's the number one reason to attend PhoneGap Day? Timing, no wait the community. The community really comes out for this conference. I can't think of another conference I've attended where you can meet so many committers. If you were there you could have met all those people you see fixing bugs on JIRA and checking code into GIT.

Beyond the committers there were lots of folks who are building real applications with PhoneGap and they are there for you to talk with, network and generally pick their brains.

There were a lot of great presentations this year but if I was going to single out three they'd be Andy Trice's PhoneGap+Hardware, Michael Brooks super slick PhoneGap Command Line demo/presentation (I only wish I was that smooth) and finally Lyza Danger Gardner's deck on PhoneGap Self-Defense for Web Devs. That one was jam packed with things web devs should know before diving into PhoneGap.

I was sweating my talk a bit before heading up on stage. I was about to give a speech recognition demo on a stage in front of 250 people. There were so many things that could have gone wrong like the (network, crowd volume) and one thing did. For some reason my MBP would not mirror the displays so either I could see the presentation or the audience could. Luckily, as a former boy scout, I was prepared. I was hosting my presentation on Dropbox so I was able to slide over to Tommy-Carlos Williams laptop to do my demo without holding up the show. Thanks again Tommy!

Sacrificing my laptop to the demo gods seemed to appease them and the rest of my presentation went off pretty well with only one unintentionally funny moment. People seemed to have liked it which I was happy about. You can download a PDF version of the presentation but it plays much better as a live demo.

All of these presentation videos will be available soon. In fact when mine is up I'll be posting it here. As well I'm lagging behind posting my source code but I'm kinda busy with some other commitments I'll talk about on a later date.

Beyond catching up with all of the other PhoneGap committers it was a great conference for meeting folks I internet knew, In Real Life. Besides the afore mentioned Tommy-Carlos Williams who shocked me by not having an Australian accent, he is USA born, I got to meet my co-worker Marcel Kinard for the first time. Both Marcel and I work at IBM where he is managing IBM's contributions to the PhoneGap/Cordova code base. Finally I got to know Jim Cowart of Icenium pretty well over the conference. Jim's done a great write up of the conference himself.

Honestly, I will carry to my grave the memory of the taste of Griddled Bacon Wrapped Date with warm honey from Tora Bravo. Jim, Marcel, Burin and I went there after the first day of the conference and we were all blown away with how good the food was. I guess it is not a secret but Portland is a great city for foodies.

Finally I will leave you with this over the shoulder video of me playing Galaga at Ground Kontrol the amazing barcade (bar + arcade) courtesy of Jim.

7 comments:

Jim Cowart said...

Great recap! I tend to have the desire to randomly yell "JAZZ!" at other people's computers now - which is a win, IMO. The presentations were awesome - such a wide array of incredibly helpful & inspiring content. Definitely glad I got to meet you IRL, and can't wait to polish my sorely lacking Galaga skills for next year. :-)

Unknown said...

Meh, i could not come cause its a few thousand kilometres away frm my location in Germany... maybe in Amsterdam when my company agrees with my thvugts about my summer holiday ;)

Simon MacDonald said...

@Dominic Roesmann

I'll give you a pass on this one since you are in Germany. The event in Amsterdam promises to be just as good. The organizer is spending this week in San Francisco so there should be an announcement on presenters soon.

Unknown said...

Sir i want backup of image folder and restore it using webservices

Simon MacDonald said...

@Fiaz Hussain

Sounds reasonable, what's stopping you?

Unknown said...

Hi Simon,

I like to have your suggestion on this. What you think about this memory leak issue http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12803309/android-webview-asset-reference-memory-leak . I am facing this issue in android 4.0.4 device and am using cordova 2.8 .

I searched lot about this issue and finally i got the solution is load files from internal or external storage, not from asset folder. Is that correct way? Is there any other solution to solve this issue? Tell me your idea about this.

Thanks

Simon MacDonald said...

@niranjana devi

I've never seen this problem before in any of my apps or honestly heard about it on the forums. If you had to do the work around use internal storage though.