Inviqa Dev Day
22 Feb 2017 at Skills Matter CodeNode

A look back over 2016, what we achieved (and what we didn't), where we are today, and plans for 2017.

Account management, viewed from the outside, can seem an opaque and obscure art form. I will walk you through the principles, whys and wherefores, and will try to convince you that your AM is an important ally in the profitable delivery of your project. Warning: there may be inadvertent attempts at humour.

A walkthrough of how the command line has evolved from the first shell all way to what we know and use today. We'll explore the power of command line, how the different flavours work, why they exist, what came before, and how we can use it to its full potential – with live (ish) demos.

Communication overload is everywhere we look. From clients and project briefs – from colleagues, the internet, social media, platforms, TV, and so on. Giles will review the landscape based on his 19 years' experience in branding, marketing, and UX. Look forward to five tips on how to focus on and communicate the information that's relevant (and how to discard what is not).

PHP 7 for the first time introduced simple consistent functions to access good quality pseudo-random values from within PHP applications. But many applications written for earlier PHP versions, or still supporting them, use other methods to generate random values – with mixed results. Such home-cooked methods often use unsuitable pseudo-random generators and seeding methods. We will take a look at the weird and wonderful methods developers have used in common open-source applications such as Wordpress and Magento. After digging down into the PHP source to find what the underlying functions actually rely on we will be putting on our hacking hats to try breaking an example application using bad random.

How long does it take to deliver a feature? Indifferent of an answer you might give, my reaction would be 'too long'. That reaction would not be due to my overblown expectations, but rather to the fact that I believe there are no right answers to the wrong questions. This talk will attempt to explore and demonstrate how project delivery looks when the team focuses on delivering software increments rather than features.

PHPBench is a benchmarking tool. In contrast to profiling tools it allows you to accurately measure and statistically analyse the real time taken for 'units of code to run'. It is strongly influenced by PHPUnit. This talk will provide an introduction to PHPBench.

This talk is about my journey of embracing the concept of slicing features into small, demonstrable stories with some real examples of how I came to understand it. It will then explore what can happen when features are broken down in this way.

With big sales events such as Black Friday becoming increasingly popular, load testing can provide crucial information when planning for periods of increased traffic. I will relay my experience of developing Gatling load test suites for two of our clients, the hurdles and pitfalls I encountered, and the lessons learnt. It will be a mix of technical plus some non-technical aspects, such as planning a load test and dealing with customer expectations. I will also cover how we have recently started using Flood.io to provide infrastructure for running our tests and the benefits it provides.

As a survivor of an ad-serving industry, I have decided to share my knowledge of the complicated intricacies of the online advertising industry. What is retargeting and what do media buyers do? This talk is here to help you understand what goes into making those tiny annoying boxes on websites.

This talk looks at some of the practical uses of Scala Cats library. Whilst Cats' documentation focuses on the more theoretical side of functional programming you can benefit from it without learning that first. Cats will be introduced by looking at some examples of common patterns that crop up when writing Scala and how Cats can be used to clean them up. Some theory will be introduced along the way where it helps to tie these examples together.

QA within a Scrum context has one big problem: stories tend to become testable only towards the end of a sprint, and often all at once! This can greatly reduce the amount of testing time available for each sprint. Kanban's 'stop starting, start finishing' principle, which encourages the team to limit work in progress and collaborate to get stories across the board, is potentially an ideal solution to this problem. This talk discusses the benefits that Kanban brings to the QA process, including better dev-QA collaboration, faster feedback loops, and less wasted resource. James will also discuss the challenges and stumbling blocks of adopting Kanban for greenfield projects, and introduce a recommended workflow for effective QA within a Kanban context.

This talk is about the evolution of how we present information on the web, from plain, linear documents in the early days of the web, to flexible layouts and new layout standards for the mobile age.

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TBC