Sessions at Whisky Web conference on Friday 13th April

This talk is a celebration of the letter F as regards to software formation. From his first feats in forming friction free software, Josh has been fanatically fighting the furious fight for first class software. This talk is a free flowing fantastic flurry of fulmination about being fearful of failure, focusing on the fixed, forcing feedback and much more… So consider yourself forewarned.

Clients need to know how much a project will cost. Waterfall development is always late and over-budget. Agile development is done when it's done. You're left with estimates that you know are too low and then you squeeze them anyway. It shouldn't be this way. We'll look at how this happens, early warning signs, ways out and ways of avoiding it in the first place.

This presentation introduces OpenStreetMap and explains to the audience
what sort of rich data set it has. I will also cover different APIs for
using the map tiles as well as other APIs that form sister-projects to OSM,
such as Nominatim (search), routing, and obtaining current-location
information. Some hints on storage and searching will also be given.

During the course of the presentation I will also have to dip into some
of the theoretical issues surrounding map making in general.

Been thinking of trying out Node.js but not sure where to start? This fast-paced session hits all the highlights; the key concepts and skills you'll need to easily and quickly build scalable Web apps.

Unlike some introductions that spend time explaining event loops and web sockets, this session start with a typical "Hello, Node" demo and quickly moves to short, fully-functional apps that show how to deal with static files, POST forms, mashups from other servers, file manipulation, data-handling, and even supporting HTTP Authentication.

If you need to get up-to-speed on Node.js really fast, or just want to get a great introduction to coding this powerful Web server, this talk is for you.

Software engineering is not an easy profession. You have to constantly learn new things to improve your coding skills and make sure you produce better and cleaner code over time. It's not difficult, but you have to be aware of a few basic principles. With them in mind you will feel a better engineer and will gain respect from your fellow engineers. And the Lord said: "Thou shall always remember to write unit tests - no matter the deadline. Remember to keep the build green. Thou shall commit often and with meaningful messages (...)"

The Emperor's New Clothes
(or how I learned to ask "is the cool thing the right thing")

As web loving technologists, we're fans of innovation in our field - but at what cost? I explore the validity of today's favourite technology bandwagons and their impact on development, project management and end users.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is estimated to produce 15 petabytes of data per year. This is difficult to store let alone understand!

With connected devices quickly out numbering connected people, we are soon going to be swamped with data. Visualising the constant stream of information we are collecting so that it can be better understood is going to be a critical task.

In this presentation, I'll walk you through a quick overview of some basic chart and graph design, then look at how easy it is to write some quick scripts in your favourite language to produce beautiful graphics. SVG is an under-rated technology, but it can be created programmatically and quickly to visualise data.

Testing a PHP web application is relatively easy when it designed to be "testable", with none of those ugly things such as excessive use of the global scope, lots of procedural code, and plenty of nested objects. Rarely do we step into such a project, making it difficult for developers to start making strides in adding automated testing to legacy code like this. In this talk I'll explore strategies for getting testing going inside your project, drawing upon experiences of making legacy code more testable.

Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend and only provide an API endpoint at their backend, resulting in a much more fluent and desktop-application-like user experience. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques, some older, some brand new which will help you to:

• create rich JavaScript based Web Applications
• make API calls to external domains
• authenticate these calls through OAuth2 without compromising your secrets
• load external content and JavaScript widgets safely
• get real-time notifications from your backend with activityStrea.ms, PubsubHubbub, node.js and Websockets
• and use the browser to store the some of the user's data.

Additionally to talking about it, I'll show you how this works all together in a real JavaScript mashup based on the StatusNET micro blogging platform.

HTTPS, SSL, SSH, PGP are terms most people know that they are somehow related to encryption. But how does it work? During this talk you will find out why even the most complex encryption algorithms used today are based on very simple concepts. We will dive into the basics of public key encryption, how it works and together with some (simple) examples, give you some insight on encryption in general.

And who the heck are Alice and Bob anyway?

A lot of developers still develop their app as though it would be deployed on a single server. Things have changed, the internet has changed and in a lot of cases applications are getting deployed on multiple servers.

Cloud is the term we often use to define this model, but unfortunately a lot of developers are unaware of this shift. This talk will point out the pitfalls and the tricks to be used.

The success of the Web as a system for information exchange that effortlessly scaled to span an entire planet can be attributed to a very small set of key factors. But the interactions have thus far been driven by the smartest, most adaptable hypermedia consumers there are: human brains. Now it is time for machines to communicate in the same evolvable, unbreakable and interoperable fashion.