NikCast

The web is the most powerful and ubiquitous application delivery platform in the world. And yet, in recent years it’s become an underdog, overshadowed by native applications brokered through costly app stores. But the introduction of a set of new technologies, which when used together, supercharge existing web applications into powerful ”Progressive Web Applications” have the web poised to steal back the spotlight it so rightfully deserves – and engage users more deeply than ever. Come to this session to learn the fundamentals of Progressive Web Apps, and how to turn your standard web app into something that’s installable, works offline and can more deeply engage users via push notifications with nothing more than a browser and your existing web development tool set.

Grokking Gastronomy

Modern users expect more than ever from web applications. Unfortunately, they are also consuming applications more frequently from low bandwidth and low power devices – which strains developers to not only nail the user experience, but also the application’'s performance. WebPageTest, a free and open source web performance testing tool, equips developers with the knowledge they need to have a fighting chance against these rising expectations. This session will introduce WebPageTest, cover the basics of how to use it, and dive into a few of it's more complex and powerful features.

Study upon study confirms that web performance has a direct correlation to revenue, operating costs, and search engine ranking. With this in mind, we all want our applications to be faster but how do we know what bottlenecks to focus on? Join Nik Molnar, co-founder of the open source debugging and diagnostics tool Glimpse, to learn how to leverage free and open source tools to capture your application’s live performance data, understand what the metrics mean and focus on the ones you should really care about. This session will cover how to use free services to act as a simple lab for synthetic performance testing and how to get Real User Metrics (RUM) from the very last mile via the instrumentation API’s built into browsers. Nik will also demonstrate techniques to automate the performance feedback loop so you can ensure to always treat “fast as a feature”. This session is suitable for any stakeholder who cares about performance. It is classified as 200 level.

Microsoft’s premier cloud solution for custom web applications, Azure Web Sites, has brought the DevOps movement to millions of developers and revolutionized the way that servers are provisioned and applications deployed. Included with all the headline functionality are many smaller, less-known or undocumented features that serve to greatly improve developer productivity. Join Microsoft MVP and veteran web developer Nik Molnar for a whirlwind tour of these secret features and enhance your cloud development experience. This beginner session is suitable for developers both using and curious about MAWS.

GitHub, as instrumental as it is, knows that they cannot possibly offer a one-size-fits-all service that meets the needs to every OSS project. With that in mind, come join Nik Molnar, co-founder of Glimpse, for a session on how to extend GitHub by leveraging their API’s, cutting edge web technologies and free/open source tools to provide users, contributors and project maintainers with a better overall experience. This session is not about Git itself and is suitable for OSS project maintainers and all users of GitHub.

Modern users expect more than ever from web applications. Unfortunately, they are also consuming applications more frequently from low bandwidth and low power devices – which strains developers not only to nail the user experience, but also the application’s performance. Join Nik Molnar, co-founder of the open source debugging and diagnostics tool Glimpse, for an example-driven look at strategies and techniques for improving the performance of your web application all the way from the browser to the server. We’ll cover how to use client and server side profiling tools to pinpoint opportunities for improvement, solutions to the most common performance problems, and some suggestions for getting ahead of the curve and actually surpassing user’s expectations. This session covers a wide array of topics, most of which would be classified within the 200 level.

Glimpse, an open source web application diagnostics tool, went from a rough back-of-a-napkin idea to a project with tens of thousands of users and developer media attention within a period of eight weeks. Join Glimpse’s co-founder, Nik Molnar, for an honestly raw tale of the pains and lessons learned that arose managing an open source project. Along the way, Nik will cover the tools and techniques that have proven successful over the past two years developing Glimpse, focusing on technical challenges and best practices for community management, communications and open source/life balance. This session is suitable for founders, maintainers, contributors and all users of open source software and aims to spark conversation around the best way to foster open source and open source etiquette.