For Developers, By Developers.
The Esri Developer Summit is just a few days away, and I can tell from the coffee consumption around the office that people at Esri are working hard to put the final touches on presentations and everything else going on next week. I’m pretty sure the guy down the hall from me had hair last week.
The title of this post is the theme for the Developer Summit. It really is For Developers, By Developers. You, the developer are coming down to sunny Palm Springs to hear about the latest Esri tech, how to use it, what to make of it, even get face time with Esri developers around the conference. I highly recommend you spend some time in the showcase area. This is the large room with all the booths and Esri developers sitting around waiting to talk to you. Seriously, have a question, test app, or any other query, please just find an appropriate area and ask. If someone doesn’t know the answer, we’ll try to direct you to someone that will.
There’s a great blog post on the Esri blogs, Technical Session Guide for the Web Developer with some awesome suggestions on tech sessions to attend and learning paths based on where you think you fall as a web developer. This isn’t all sessions, but does cover most of the web development stuff.
I definitely think you should check it out and plan to attend quite a few of those sessions, maybe even ones I’m involved in. I’m just sayin’.
But, as I always suggest every year, I think there is a lot of really great material to be had in the user presentations. These are the presentations done by fellow developers, not Esri employees, that are using the technology in a production environment. These are the people that have had to set up servers on outdated machines, have had to work through some obscure bug that only occurs with a specific release of Oracle installed on a specific version of Windows and Windows Update and using Internet Explorer with non-standard security policies and still manage to get shit done. These are developers.
Don’t limit your calendar to tech sessions, go pick some brains of fellow developers and support them by attending their user presentations.
I don’t know the details of these user sessions, I’m just going off the title of some that sounded interesting.
- Utilization of JavaScript and PHP to Develop a Traffic Analysis Web Map - description - anyone using PHP has seen stuff man.
- Operations Dashboard as a Sharepoint Management Device - description - I’ve done some light Sharepoint stuff in the past and I’m sure many other enterprise devs are using it.
- Integrating the ArcGIS JavaScript API with a Web Application Framework - description - This is using SAPUI5, which sounds interesting. I never used it, but know lots of devs use SAP.
- Supercharge Your ArcGIS App with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and AWS CloudFront - description - I might try to catch this one, sounds interesting to me!
- Mapping with Alexa - description - I had this kooky idea to try and autogenerate maps in Online based on Alexa hacking. I never got to run with it, but I would love to check this out.
It would also be remiss of me, if I didn’t recommend checking out any or all sessions from Dylan Schiemann of Sitepen on Thursday afternoon. He’s going to talking JavaScript, I’m sure some TypeScript and Dojo 2 and Dojo 2 widgets. That’s where I’ll be Thursday.
There’s plenty more user presentations where those came from. Check out the schedule, find something that might interest you and learn something!
Above all else at DevSummit, have a good time learning. There’s a lot of information that will be flowing at DevSummit, take it in, get excited. Get to know some new developers. I’ve been going to DevSummit for years and I’ve met tons of great people over that time and I look forward to seeing lots of familiar faces, but plenty of new ones as well!