Try Harder 2012

The above is what it looks like from a speakers position at the try { harder } conference. (click to embiggen).

I had indented to write this post a couple of weeks ago, immediately after the conference but STRATO denied that. But oh well, here it is anyways.

This year was the second annual try { harder } conference / coder retreat / brain explosion. I have spoken about try harder in the past but it really is a uniquely awesome event. Its a rather intimate affair  where 10-15 people getting together and sharing ideas and knowledge in the tranquil forests of Center Parks Nottingham.

The format was largely the same as last year. Everyone gave a talk on a topic of their choosing, some were technical talks such as David Arno's on C# (NCrunch, MVC & Mono) or Mattes Groeger's on developing iOS social games. Quite a few talks were on non-technical things such as David Wagner's talk on 'the value of tinkering' or Stray's talk on 'Heuristics, collaboration special sauce'. Each talk was fascinating and the wide range of topics covered adds to the special feel of this event.

When deciding what to give my talk on I couldn't make my mind up. I have been through a lot this year from launching my first business then having it fail to exploring a great many new tools and technologies to creating and launching my first mobile game. Not to mention all the cool things I have had the pleasure to work on at Playdemic. In the end it was a tweet from David Wagner who suggested that I talk about an exciting tool I had been experimenting around with lately; Adobe Monocle.

Adobe Monocle is the new profiler for flash and mobile content from Adobe and really is very nice. It currently still in pre-release and hence under NDA so I had to ask for permission before giving the talk on it. I haven't had permission to blog about it get so if you want to find out more about it then check out this video that Thibault Imbert made a few months back:



I personally think it is a game changer for flash game makers. It makes development so much easier by giving better insights as to what is going on inside your game.

Try Harder is more about simply giving talks however. Each afternoon was set aside for pair programming sessions. Like last year we were given a deceptively simply problem then split off in pairs to try to solve that problem in a test-driven way. The kicker was that at the end of your hour with your parter you then must delete all your work and start again with the next person.

The problem we were given this year was "to find and score the palindromes with a length greater than 3 chars in a given string". Seems simple, but when you get into it, it is deceptively complex. Because of the varied programming backgrounds of the attendees there were many different tools and technologies used.

Of the 6 different partners I had I solved the problem using: Javascript, Actionscript3, Haxe, C#, Java and Ruby using TextMate, Flash Builder, FlashDevelop, Visual Studio and IntelliJ. It was fascinating to see the multitude of ways to solving the same problem

Try Harder is held in the heart of the forests of Center Parks Nottingham. This adds to a sense of "getting away from it all" and I found it to be a really helped with concentrating on what we were doing. In many of the evenings I enjoyed walking around the forests or swimming in the pool or sampling David Wagner's rather excellent scotch whisky that he brought with his all the way from Scotland (cheers Dave!)

   

So if you cant tell I had a great time at try { harder } this year. I think because I knew what to expect this time I could relax and enjoy the whole thing a little more. I also approached the event with a much more open mind which meant I could relax more and enjoy the format.

Bring on try { harder } 2013!

WWX & Try Harder 2012

I just realised that I still hadn't posted anything about the Haxe conference, WWX 2012, I attended at in February of this year, how lax of me! Well actually I was waiting for the videos to be released so I could give a link to the lightning talk I gave on my WebGL experiments from last year. (Un)fortunately however, the lightning talks weren't recorded so you cant see my nervously mumble through my presentation.

I can however link to the videos from all the other speakers that attended the event which were excellent BTW:

http://www.silexlabs.org/?s=wwx

While im here I thought I would mentioned that Im going to be attending try { harder } next month for the second year in a row. As last year the idea is that everyone that attends gives a talk on a topic, it was a fascinating but brain-intensive 4 days last year, im definitely hoping for some more of the same this year!

Try { Harder } 2012 Levelup

Last year I was fortunate to be one of the lucky 16 to attend the first try { harder } experimental conference / coder retreat in Nottingham. As mentioned in my blog post at the time it was an incredible 4-day event in which I learnt so much from some of the most talented and experienced people in the flash community.

The event was such a success that not only is it going to run again this year (which I hope very much to attend) but there is also an additional "levelup" conference happening next week. The idea behind the levelup is to provide businesses and freelancers with an intensive 4-day training and motoring session. The mentors are hand picked from the previous try harder members and so represent some of the best in their field.

What's more Stray, the primary organiser of the event has just announced that Jetbrains the makers of the popular IntelliJ IDEA IDE are going to be sponsoring the event meaning each paying participant will receive a licence to use the IDE!

Interested? Head over to the levelup site and sign up: http://www.tryharder.org.uk/level-up-2012/

 

try {harder} - my haXe slides and code

This week was a week of firsts. It was the first meeting for the try {harder} conference. It was the first flash conference I have ever attended and it was my first time speaking infront of a group of my peers on a topic I feel passionate about.

The idea behind the conference was to introduce a smaller (16 people), more intimate conference environment where the key was to learn and inspire. And in that goal it certainty succeeded.

The fact that everyone had to give a talk encouraged attentiveness and participation as you knew it was only a matter of time before you were in the same situation. It also reduced the stress that comes from speaking to so many very intelligent people.

When Stray contacted me to suggest that my talk's topic was to be on haXe I was very uncertain. I didn't feel like I had enough experience with haXe to confidently speak about it having only worked with it for less than a year. It turned out however to be a good thing, it pushed me to find out more about haXe, research some areas I had heard about but never investigated.

When constructing my slides I knew that I could never cover all of haXe as its such a large topic with so many interesting facets. I decided that I should probably concentrate on targeting the talk towards my target audience. That is very experienced Actionscript and Flex developers who probably had heard of haXe but never really had any impotence to pick it up and use it any more.

With that in mind I structured my slides around what I considered the big advantages of haXe over Actionscript or Javascript. I also knew that my audience are all very experienced programmers so I tried to give plenty of code samples and examples.

Anyways, at the end of the day I really enjoyed preparing and giving my first talk at try {harder}. It was well received and I just hope I have succeeded in inspiring some more people into investigating and using haXe.

I wrote my slides in google docs which are viewable online: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc6wvdg5_151frv985w7

The code samples and examples mentioned on slides are uploaded here: http://mikecann.co.uk/projects/TryHarder.zip