From Silicon Valley Code Camp 2010, Part II.

Day 2

In the session on Fun with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, Tab Atkins Jr. [substituted for Newton Chan and] took the audience through creating a complete gaming program on the fly, called worms, by making use of the canvas element. Very educational.

In the session on REST for the rest of us, Ken Yagen provided an overview of the RESTx open source framework for creating RESTful services through demos. Key characteristics of this framework are:

1. RESTx resources are self-discoverable through RESTful APIs.
2. RESTx lets you define your services in any language of your choice.

He recommended the O'Reilly book on RESTful Web Services as good introductory reading material.

The session on Building Video Applications with YouTube API by Jarek Wilkiewicz was useful because the published APIs available both for browser-based integration with Player APIs and rich back-end data store with Data API enable rich vertical integration. Some amazing statistics:

• 2B views/day
• 150m mobile views/day
• 24 hours of video uploaded/minute

The final session of the camp that I attended was with the title Are you ready to switch your role from PM to scrum master? Do you know what you do not know? by Amit Sarkar. One thought I came away with was the Agile and Waterfall methodologies are useful in different contexts; the Agile is definitely more useful in software development arena. Has any one used the Agile methodology in, say, the construction of a large airport such as the San Francisco International in place of Waterfall methodology?

Epilogue

Pulling together all the resources to accomplish as an enormous a task as this camp is really very commendable. Thank you, Peter Kellner. Equally commendable are the corporate and institutional sponsorships that funded the activity. Particularly for the for-profit companies, this form of social responsibility will only increase societal goodwill towards them.