Esri Developer Summit 2015: Day 1

Mar 11, 2015

Day one of Esri Developer Summit officially kicked off today. Here is my rundown of stuff I saw today.

Plenary

I missed the first half of the plenary because it was way too packed and I hadn’t had enough coffee to just stand there. I did catch the second half of the plenary and saw the goody bits on the upcoming changes to the ArcGIS API for JavaScript that will expand on the client-side geometry engine as well some neat looking 3D capabilities. I have a project with some possible 3D requirements coming up, so this really interests me. There was also a lot of talk on the runtime SDK updates across the board. Xamarin support for the .NET guys and AppStudio looks like it could be really awesome for native dev.

JavaScript

So I sat in on JavaScript sessions. Dave Bouwman had a session talking about some things to consider when looking at JavaScript frameworks. Ember seems to be something that meets a lot of the needs he is looking for. Ember hates my guts and my existing APIs and I’m pretty sure stole my dog. But I’d be willing to give it another shot.

I also saw the ArcGIS API for JavaScript: What Have you Done for Me Lately, which covered a lot of the cool things the API has released since 3.10, including renderers and layers. It was a solid session into some stuff you may have missed if you weren’t keeping up with each release. Again, they showed the 4.0 stuff coming up and of course everyone wants it now.

Speed Geeking

I always enjoy the Speed Geeking sessions. It’s 5 minute sessions of Esri folks sharing some great stuff with small groups. There was some neat leaflet-plugin goodness, an awesome twitter scraper, a very interesting little talk on the fibonacci sequence in app design. There was some cool stuff on automating tests and deployment, AWS, S3 and koop. I missed Mansour’s little session, he was probably talking about how to launch drones for DIY LIDAR using a Wii controller or something.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the week. One of the best things about DevSummit is having the chance to meet up with lots of people I interact with via Twitter and put a face to a profile. Feel free to say hi, ask if I have a copy of ArcGIS Web Dev on my and I’ll hook you up.