So that was a pretty busy weekend! Thank you to all the organisers and the sponsors for yet another amazing BarCamp London.
If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, go read about how it works, and then come back to read my notes on some of the sessions I attended.
Here’s a picture of all the sessions that the attendees ran over the weekend (that’s a lot!) and it doesn’t list all the random conversations, games and general meeting people that happened outside of the posted schedule.
devoxx4kids
Dan Hardiker @dhardiker
http://www.devoxx4kids.org/
- one day workshop
- aimed at age 8-16
- 8-9 year olds treated a bit differently — they need a bit more guidance
- with specific goals
- make a robot
- iOS game development
- want to say “I made that”
- one child been building iOS apps since age 6:
- worldwide
- dominican republic had > 1000 kids over 2 days
- > 30% people who come are girls/women
- generally 5 or 6 tracks selected from:
- minecraft modding
- scratch
- python
- lego mindstorms
- raspberry pi
- arduino
- greenfoot
- alice
- kojo
- iOS
- mathbreakers
- NAO robot
- 4 sessions in a day
- also go to big conferences and run devoxx4kids for the adults
- first London event in June
- got 95% attendance from people who signed up!!
- 4 x 1hr sessions
- 40 volunteers
- had an 11 year-old fly over on his own (met his dad at airport) to run a group of 20 x 11-15 year-olds how to do minecraft modding
- he also did a closing keynote
- had the creator of greenfoot teaching how to build a minesweeper game
- have a load of volunteers available to help children build stuff
- have a show and tell at the end of the day
- mindstorms:
- build the main wheelbase
- children add grab arms to grab a ball
- get children to control by hand first
- program the same steps (5 steps forward etc)
- add touch & distance sensors
- program to grab without hard-wiring distance
how to start a hackerspace
Matt Copperwaite @mattcopp
- start a company - level of protection
- limited company - need 3 people, can then state not for profit
- community interest - lots of paperwork
- business bank account
- barclays have APIs, £50 cashback at the time…
- insurance: paid £300/year
- recommendation from London Hackspace
- BIS will issue advice on this shortly
- keep trustees involved
- raise issues that split them: colour of the logo…!
- system designed so you can cancel the membership at any point
- get people signed up with open days
- people really like laser cutters!
See current UK Hackspaces at:
kinect v2
Mike Taulty @mtaulty
- v2 is £159 (cheaper than v1 at £199!)
- HD video
- infrared
- depth sensor
- can track up to 6 bodies (25 skeletal joints)
- tracks depth from 0.5m to about 8m
- infrared & depth is much lower res: 512 x 424 pixels
- body index separates pixels of different bodies
- lets you do green screen really easily
- MS’s SDK is Windows only (doesn’t work with Windows VMs since it needs USB 3 & DirectX 11)
- but libfreenect2 is an alternative open source driver for Mac/Linux
mobile network in a field
Sam Machin @sammachin and Kevin Prince @kevinprince
https://fieldphone.org at EMF Camp 2014
- EMF Camp was c.1200 people
- runs every two years
- “a very british burning man” or “glastonbury for nerds”
- aiming for phone calls but not data
- mainly because of there was already fast wifi
- just three base stations, so could simply architecture a fair bit…
- using OpenBTS, Asterisk + Twilio & Heroku
- Asterisk server sat in the on-site hosting centre
- a refrigerated shipping container with servers on pallets
- recreated phone supply chain by using Amazon & a tent
- bought some Amazon burner phones on 30 day return…
- SIMs were the hardest things to sort
- wanted to play nicely with other networks
- didn’t want people on real networks to connect to camp network
- SIMs are pretty expensive: 50p to £1 each
- hard to order in low quantities
- bought OpenBTS boxes from RangeNetworks
- startup in SF
- mostly selling to small Pacific islands
- massively cheaper than normal kit (c.$5K)
- also put one in a search & rescue helicopter in Iceland
- connects to someone’s phone as it flies over
- locates to area of a football field
- allows helicopter to call phone!
- need spectrum to run in the UK…
- O2 had some they had forgotten about ;-)
- concurrent spectrum license: shared by 15 companies
- better in other countries:
- Netherlands: just need landowner permission
- Germany: just need 30 days notice
- Burning Man: use DARPA military spectrum not in use in the middle of the Nevada desert
- antennas make a big difference
- need a proper site survey
- EMF Camp provide about 40 routers around the site
- set up in locked portaloos! Datenklos (term from CCC)
- created everybody’s accounts ahead of time
- needed to map phone numbers to IMSIs
- got people to type in last 4 digits of SIM
- set up voicemail using twilio to record and forward via email
- SMSs are harder if you need to store & forward
- dealt with inbound calls by having a single central public number
- call it and then dial 5 digit account number
- added outgoing calls as well (via Twilio)
- limited to c.3 minutes
- but even so fairly cheap
- also set up a few group rooms to see if people used them
- stats:
- ~200 SIMs handed out
- ~100 attached users at any time
- close to 100% coverage
- about 1800 minutes of twilio
- ideas for next time:
- phone boxes
- POTS to tent: turn up and plug in a BT phone!
managing CSS
Ben Scott @BPScott
http://reload.me.uk/talk-structuring-css
- people keep on writing new CSS
- not obvious how and where things are used
- no confidence in what you can change and if it will break anything
- build smaller isolated things
structure
- components
- domain-specific objects
- text next to image in a particular way
- macro layout
- grid system
- layout of components within a page
- theming
resulting composition
- this thing, here on the page, in this colour
- mobile first & extend from core functionality
- much easier to reason about adding in CSS
- harder to take things out
- use additional classes to toggle additional behaviour
- Brad Frost: atomic design
- pages are accidents — what happens when you put components in a particular order
- create a styleguide page
- component, layout variations
- automatically generated from HTML partials in application
- HTML partials are essentially custom tags
tips
- avoid using IDs in CSS selectors
- try to keep selectors to max 3 levels
- naming convention: BEM
- double underscore = within
- double hyphen = modifier
problems & breaking up
- mobile first, but oldIE needs to be desktop first as it doesn’t understand media queries
- could use respond.js but takes a lot longer to load
- created Breakup
- SASS/Compass plugin
- generates different CSS files from the same SASS input
- according to directives in top-level
- lets you avoid wrapping specific elements in media queries
real life brain training
SenseLabs http://getversus.com
- split activity into different frequency bands = EEG
- delta < 4 KHz
- babies have this all the time
- theta 4 - 7 KHz
- alpha 7 - 14 KHz
- beta 15 - 30 KHz
- gamma 30 - 100 KHz
- other stuff:
- Mu (8 - 12 KHz)
- SMR (13 - 15 KHz)
- neurofeedback
- constant feedback, close to realtime (~200ms)
- useful to use more than one sense to enable different people to relate to it better
- current system has five measurement points
- Chief Science Office is Leslie Sherlin
training
- focus:
- augment low beta
- inhibit theta & alpha
- can train stress response too
- sports consistency
- exam preparation
problems
- QA engineer was overusing focus training
- had problems sleeping…
uses (not scientifically proven)
- worked with Felix Baumgartner
- tennis players
- reported to alleviate long term ADHD…
- improved sleep patterns amongst developers…
available systems
- medical
- existing $10K for bare minimum
- require expensive software, only run on Windows XP
- kickstarter systems
- cool, but not much neuroscientist input
- not so accurate or useful
- versus
- looks like headphones
- rebaseline every time you put it on
- connects over bluetooth to iPad
- uses dry spikes sensors that contact scalp
- first consumer product $750, aiming for $500
toys & gadgets
- thalmic myo
- bluetooth armband picking up arm and hand actions
- oculus rift
- NFC ring
- lower range than usual
- internal and external tags (private & public?)
- Google Glass
- estimote beacons
- use at least three to get indoor location fixes
- google have set up mountain view…
- chromecast
- don’t bother with a digital picture frame — just get a cheap TV and one of these
- great for broadcasting any media around the house
- almond+ touchscreen router & home security
- 3D printer
- check out 3d printer subreddit
- solidoodle
- arduino will be launching one v. soon
- MIOPS camera trigger
- plugs in to flash hotshoe
- light sensor
- laser sensor
scaling agile
Matt Walton, Head of Product @ FutureLearn @matt_walton
spotify
- have documented a lot of their processes
- think it, build it, ship it, tweak it
- now about 2000 people
- squads consist of engineers, designers & agile coaches
- autonomous teams with long running missions
- spotify engineering culture
- “agile at scale requires trust at scale”
GDS
- lots of information radiators
- product roadmap split into team “swimlanes”
- have a scrum of scrums
songkick
- similar teams
- each team needs:
- product management
- design lead
- tech lead
- how to organise a roadmap
- KIPs broken into themes
- time box themes
- agree measurements
- form autonomous team
- lean analytics (book)
- ratio or rate, not a total number
- business focussed aims:
- if … then … because
- based on lean analytics experiments
- two backlogs: separate “hygiene”
- then add 70% valid features, 30% bugs, tech support to each iteration
futurelearn
- product strategy themed by vision areas
- each sprint split by % of work for BAU, products, etc
- standups and retrospectives still whole team to encourage community
- though work done in smaller project teams
conclusion
- share vision, mission & values
- give autonomy and create community
- rhythm & reflection
