Invited Talks

I have arranged for a few speakers to come and talk to us about some topics relevant to webapp development. Note that attendance to these lectures is mandatory. I am also making them open to the public so if you know of someone who is interested, invite them along.

Backbone.js

On Monday, November 26, Brad Dunbar will talk about Backbone.js.

Brad is an alumnus of our department. He is a front-end engineer. He currently works at Pathable Inc. writing javascript (and coffeescript) and I does a lot of open source work for Backbone and Underscore.

Building rich, model-centric, event-driven web apps using EF, Razor & open source

On Wednesday, November 28. Jamie Thomas

In this interactive walk-through, we will create a custom application from scratch using proven Microsoft tools and technologies and a healthy dose of new approaches to software development. This session will demonstrate how easy it can be to create rich single page applications and robust client experiences while still leveraging .NET languages and tools to define the bulk of the business logic and processes (not just a tangled mess of JavaScript). While this will be a high-level demonstration, it still show how to handle hard-core problems like symmetric client and server-side template rendering, complex custom validation and event-driven model manipulation using both client and server-side rules. Though the problems solved will be hard, the solutions demonstrated will be both elegant and easy to understand.

Jamie Thomas is the Director of Software Development at VC3, an IT and software services company, headquartered here in downtown Columbia, in the IT-ology building.

Building Chrome Extensions

On Friday, November 30. Jarrell Waggoner, will show us how to build an extension for the Chrome browser.

Jarrell Waggoner is a PhD student in our department. He implemented the nonpartisan me which received some attention.