Backbone / StackMob preso at SacInteractive
July 10, 2013
Last night Sidney Maestre made the drive up from the Bay Area and gave a great presentation at SacInteractive! Sidney talked about a combination of Backbone.js and StackMob. This was by far the best Backbone presentation I've seen yet.
Sid did a great job of discussing the different facets of Backbone, starting with a simple Model example, then slowly adding to each example, showing the group about Views, Routes, Templates, etc. In between each section, Sid would show the "plain Backbone" way to do things, then would expand on that concept, showing how it's used within the StackMob API. So after each simple example, we'd get a "real world" example of how to use what we just learned.
When it comes to presentations, a big pet peeve of mine is when the presenter uses what I call "hellworld code". Meaning, when I go to a presentation and this is what the speaker is doing:
So right now it says "hello" on the screen, and now I do [insert the presentation's main point here] to the code, and it now says "hello world".
I feel these examples are far TOO simple to be of any use for many topics. I've never had a client call me up and ask me to build an app that says "hello world". Attendees have a better chance of getting excited about the presentation (and thus, giving the speaker a better review) if they are able to see how to apply it in a real-world situation.
Sid's presentation was a great example of how to do this! He started with simple yet tangible examples of Models in Backbone (the first example was modeling a bottle of wine, then a collection of several bottles of wine), then showed how to use the code we just wrote while saving data to StackMob. And each example built upon that example.
We've also attached copies of the code and slide deck over at the SacInteractive site.
Thanks again Sidney!
-Nolan / SacInteractive
Sid did a great job of discussing the different facets of Backbone, starting with a simple Model example, then slowly adding to each example, showing the group about Views, Routes, Templates, etc. In between each section, Sid would show the "plain Backbone" way to do things, then would expand on that concept, showing how it's used within the StackMob API. So after each simple example, we'd get a "real world" example of how to use what we just learned.
When it comes to presentations, a big pet peeve of mine is when the presenter uses what I call "hellworld code". Meaning, when I go to a presentation and this is what the speaker is doing:
So right now it says "hello" on the screen, and now I do [insert the presentation's main point here] to the code, and it now says "hello world".
I feel these examples are far TOO simple to be of any use for many topics. I've never had a client call me up and ask me to build an app that says "hello world". Attendees have a better chance of getting excited about the presentation (and thus, giving the speaker a better review) if they are able to see how to apply it in a real-world situation.
Sid's presentation was a great example of how to do this! He started with simple yet tangible examples of Models in Backbone (the first example was modeling a bottle of wine, then a collection of several bottles of wine), then showed how to use the code we just wrote while saving data to StackMob. And each example built upon that example.
We've also attached copies of the code and slide deck over at the SacInteractive site.
Thanks again Sidney!
-Nolan / SacInteractive