Froscon 2013

Last weekend I had the pleasure of talking about Specification by Example at the Free and Open Source Software Conference near Bonn. You can find the commented slides about Specification by Example here. If you watched the talk, I would appreciate your feedback here.

I used the opportunity to finally get in touch with LISP and its relatives and got quite intrigued by Moritz Heidkamp view on the world promoting s-expressions to be used as syntax for everything including HTML, CSS and SQL. I instantly became a fan of the regular syntax.

But I was brought down to the cruel reality again when I was trying to actually build something at the Clojure workshop. The goal was to implement the Game of Life and I failed miserably in wrapping my head around the everything-as-a-function way of thinking. Also, I spent most of the time getting the test runner to work in order to do proper TDD which seems to be a veeery unusual approach in the Lisp/Clojure world. But in the end I could run a test suite without restarting the JVM (which took almost a minute on my Atom) so I count that as a success.

My first session of the PHP subconference was a talk about our awesome architecture at ResearchGate, marrying frontend and backend given by my colleagues Bastian and Volker. I owe quite a bit to Volker for it was him who suggested to me to talk at conferences after I talked at the PHP user group a couple of times.

Saturday's last session for me was Liane Thönnes and Tim Schneider talking about cats and dogs aka Designers and Developers, their differences, their misunderstandings and their similarities. The talk was very entertaining and inspiring and strengthened my opinion that a lot of wasted time can be avoided by integrating designer into the development team.

The rest of the evening I took the opportunity to get to know the attending part of the PHP community which resulted in a great night with very enjoyable and interesting conversations with a lot of Kölsch. Since the BBQ took a while to arrive and then had a queue of at least 100m I declared Kölsch and Pfeffi as my dinner. I was even taught the "Hallemann" (Hollamann?) as tricky way to enjoy both at the same time. In short, I had an exquisit time and was very happy to have the last slot on Sunday.