Get-togethers among developers - what is the purpose?

Turku <3 Frontend is a meetup community for technology-oriented people. Monthly meetups are about front-end technologies and design such as HTML, CSS, SVG, JavaScript, design...everything one can imagine! What developers think of these get-togethers? What is the purpose?

After only few weeks in tech industry I’ve noticed one thing that I think is rare and respectful. Developers are keen to network and share their knowledge. There isn’t rival, only sincere eager to discuss and develop. When a developer finds something interesting he/she wants to share that with others. This is possible in monthly meetings, Turku <3 Frontend events, where developers from different companies sit around the table.

ANDERS DEVELOPERS ARE ALWAYS KEEN TO PARTICIPATE IN THESE EVENTS

Our Senior Web Designer Juha Kujala sums up:

I think it's always nice to participate to Turku Frontend meetups, and frankly I'm not the only one who thinks so. You need to be ready when the registration for each event opens since they are always fully booked in minutes. The atmosphere of these meetups has been nice and relaxed, and I have always felt welcomed by the organizing company.

For me the best part is about learning new stuff. There has been a lot of topics in the past years that I had no idea about beforehand. The topics might not be something that you do at your work, but it's nice to see what others do. And sometimes there might be a topic that I'm already familiar with, but I still get a different perspective to it from other developers.

Junior developer Pauliina Jalava continues: "Developers are often eager on new things, many of them study new technologies on their free-time and run their own projects. It’s all about continuous self-learning!"

Juha-Matti Santala is the key guy in arranging these monthly meetups. Anders is hosting the March meetup and every event has a different host. Once again there are interesting speakers. Sami Nieminen works at Mad Booster as a full stack developer and he has experience of developing Android. Viktor Lukashov works currently for Vaadin as a front-end engineer. He has worked as developer, project manager, solution architect and trainer.

TACKLE EVERYDAY PROBLEMS WITH GIT

Sami decided to talk about version control system Git.

It is a tool that I use in daily basis and it has saved me many times. I wish that every programmer would be familiar with it and its full potential.

Git is a "simple" command line tool for following changes of files, distributing projects and simply keeping track of the development but also much more. It might be a bit overwhelming for new programmers to start using it but when you do and get familiar with version control philosophy and all the basic options of Git you want to start using it everywhere! I will talk about common problems of which I'm pretty sure every programmer has faced at some point and solutions to those with the help of Git.

THEMING IN THE ERA OF WEB COMPONENTS AND SHADOW COMPONENTS

Viktor’s meetup talk is about how theming works for web components that are built with modern web standards.

As developers sometimes, we need to take existing 3rd party components like a date picker or a popup dialog to use on the page we build, and we want to alter their visual styles so that they match the visual design of our site. Theming is what allows developers to do that. The talk shows how the new Shadow DOM standard impacts the existing approaches to theming and what new approaches can be used.

Shadow DOM is a standard that causes some confusion even among experienced web developers. In this talk I am sharing some lessons learned by my colleagues at Vaadin that might be useful for a broader audience.

The talk gives a glimpse of the new web standards like custom elements and shadow DOM. It might be interesting for people who have heard of them but have not had a chance to look deeper. That would help to prepare for the moment in the future when they might encounter these standards in their work.

It seems to me that this industry is a great place to be. This atmosphere and eagerness on new things are something that I really want to adapt to! In my understanding, this is a way of living, a mindset, that every developer in Anders (as well as in other companies) have. Great thanks to Juhis for organising these get-together meetups!

More info about Turku <3 Frontend meetups here.

//Johanna